Into The Forrst

Forrst Architechure Redux

I wanted to take a few minutes at write an update to the Forrst Architechure (http://blog.forrst.com/post/616614116/on-forrsts-architecture). Lots of people reference that post, it’s almost a year old, and lots of things change in a year.

First, the basics. Forrst is still a PHP (5.2+) app, however, it is no longer written in CodeIgniter. We (read: Kyle) wrote a rad new PHP MVC framework called Magnus. Magnus is a very light weight framework that was written and designed for Forrst, but we do plan to release it at some point in the future. 

We are still using MySQL for the primary datastore. We store pretty much all mission critical information in MySQL. We’ve scrapped MongoDB, but we still are using Redis2.2.1 for caching expensive MySQL queries such as counts. We also use Redis for handling all of our sessions. 

The new Forrst Talk feature is powered by the absolutely amazing Pusher with web sockets, and we plan on using Pusher for lots more exciting new stuff as time rolls on. 

Pretty much everything from the original blog post is still accurate. If you have any more questions on the Forrst architecture, please feel free to email either zack at forrst dot com, or kyle at forrst dot com.

-Zack