Custom message boards at work
I'm tasked with creating a custom message board system at work. This entails re-inventing the wheel but that's cool, I'm always doing that on a day-to-day basis anyway.
Requirements
A great deal of message boards out on the web for free download are way to over spec for what we need and also do not offer the level of customisation at the data level that we require either. Most are also not set up for multi-server instances where load balancing is taking place where sessions are handled by something other than the server itself. To this end the market place has a huge gap on this front. Cloud computing might be the new buzz word, but in reality we've had it for years. It used to be called clustering and load balancing. Load balancing shapes your traffic where clustering offers redundancy; should a server go down for some reason then another takes its place. Traditionally most shared hosts, which is what a great deal of professionally written forums are designed for, have the database on the same server and although they support an external database they hardly ever support multiple instances again. You know, we might require one cluster to do the writes and one to do the reads, maybe even one cluster to deal with nothing but blobs or profiles, user access... the list goes on. To this end nothing off the shelf that I know of supports our level of infrastructure in the way we need it to. Also can you imagine some of the more popular boards dealing with 32,000+ users, they'd all crawl to a halt, I know; I've seen it before.
Custom written
To this end I need to write one from scratch, of course this has it's downfalls and potential pitfalls. I'm not daunted by that. I guess the only thing that concerns me is the potential user base (32,000+ off the bat and only likely to get bigger) and the need to load balance things, this isn't a problem until you encounter sessions, if your load balancers aren't set up correctly and do a 1-1 split on requests we soon hit an issue on storing information in a session, this then falls back to a cookie, which can also have the same problems, especially when it's set against the domain; but your DNS has the domain pointing to a firewall... The other side is integration of other services both internal and external to us. I just can here everyone screaming Sharepoint, Twitter, Facebook, the CMS, my shared drive and the like. Which poses several problems and that's data management and privacy. Whilst one person on any number of threads might want to shout to the world, just as many won't. Do I tie logins in to our network or have a separate login for forums, LDAP or Active directory? Email notifications, RSS the list goes on and on...
This task isn't small; but it will be interesting. w00t.
