Show HN: MongoDB + open source e-commerce = Forward

by ericingram • 14 years ago

107 70 14 years ago

ericingram32• 14 years ago

Developer/founder of Forward here, happy to answer questions about what it is, why, how, and take critical feedback.

Devs complain endlessly about the rigid, complex mess of e-commerce software. I'm trying to change that with a platform that is easy to understand and customize by developers. We've had a lot of success so far with early projects like http://jellyfishart.com.

MongoDB has been a huge help.

davedx2• 14 years ago

I'd love to hear a bit more detail about how MongoDB helped with the project.

ericingram32• 14 years ago

In Forward, MongoDB makes custom features easier by allowing each template to store data in different ways, without doing any database migrations or really thinking too hard about schema design. The Forward data model operates on certain fields it knows about, but allows other fields to be saved/searched in the same way. For example:

    {put [custom_field => "Blue"] in "/products/123"}

    {get $product from "/products/123"}

    Value is: {$product.custom_field}

You can also search for that value...

    {get $blue_products from "/products" [search => [custom_field => "Blue"]]}

While you could accomplish this with a SQL database also, it wouldn't be as easy to read, and probably slower.

Performance in early projects has been phenomenal with MongoDB.

burningion• 14 years ago

The layout is great, very clean, great job.

That said, how do you deal with transactions? It was my impression that MongoDB doesn't really support ACID transactions. Did you find a workaround?

I know from prior experience working on a major eCommerce store that there can be really taxing loads on the database server, right around Black Friday, and having inconsistent writes could really be disastrous. Have you tested your transactions for consistency under load?

ericingram32• 14 years ago

To start, I will say we haven't run into any issues relating to consistency under load. We do have a plan for dealing with it, using an optimistic locking mechanism (where each document has a revision number and an update requires it), but as an early project we haven't had the chance to put it up against high load for a long period of time.

Also, I'm pretty confident MongoDB is going to introduce an easier mechanism for document locking in the near future.

tommccabe• 14 years ago

Seems really interesting and promising. In terms of the e-commerce landscape, do you think that this is a competitor to the smaller-mid level platforms, e.g. Magento or Opencart, or do you expect that this can scale up to enterprise level systems and compete with ATG, Demandware, and IBM WebSphere?

ericingram32• 14 years ago

Good question. Forward will start at the small-med level because that's where our experience lies. Today we see it as comparable to the early Magento, but more developer friendly.

Time will tell, and we are very interested in offering an open source product and service that will compare with the likes of Demandware.

julien_c3• 14 years ago

Really interesting. As someone who's done some consulting in e-commerce I've always dreamt of an open source engine based on MongoDB.

Magento and Prestashop are perfect examples of "relational databases gone wrong"... 2,000 tables? Right!

ericingram32• 14 years ago

I started building my own first e-commerce business around the time Magento hit beta, and the EAV (Entity Attribute Value) model is the part that killed it for me. I had ideas for my site that didn't work out of the box, so I knew I had to understand the code to customize it.

Instead we built a platform from scratch to fit the unique features of that site, and it worked. The business did $400k in revenue the first year.

Now a few years later, I can accomplish the same thing with the same basic skills (HTML, CSS, easy to understand data storage), but I don't have to start from scratch. I wanted this to exist so that I would have fun building e-commerce sites again.

jenius• 14 years ago

We desperately need something like this. I just finished a large ecommerce project built on another open source system and it was so incredibly difficult to customize anything. It was more or less "do it the way we have in the template or you're in for a nightmare", and with the client and design specs asking for custom things, a nightmare was what ensued.

Ecommerce is super complex and it will be a really difficult mission to make this really work and be flexible without getting bloated. But if it can happen, this will be a game changing project. My full support is there, and I'll see if I can contribute as well if I have time : )

ericingram32• 14 years ago

Thanks for your support and encouragement, much appreciated!

Also, what you describe is exactly what Forward aims to fix. Custom features were needed for every single e-commerce site we've built, so we thought it made sense to focus primarily on this workflow.

mst2• 14 years ago

I tried to build this years back and made a complete mess of it.

On the other hand, I still believe it can be done and I think the approach you're taking is one of the ones with a decent chance of succeeding.

Good luck; I'll be keeping an eye out for clever ideas to steal as you move forwards :)

brittohalloran• 14 years ago

Looks amazing. You should have more technical details on the site though. This is for developers so they can handle it up front. I had to dig a bit to find out it's a templating engine built on top of PHP. More about the architecture would be good.

ericingram32• 14 years ago

You have a good point. We'll write a lot more technical detail over the coming weeks on our blog. I'm also writing a guest post (technical) for the MongoDB blog, so expect a lot more to come out soon.

The architecture: A very small PHP MVC framework (5% or so the size of Zend Framework last I checked). I started developing the earliest version of it ~6 years ago, around the time Rails picked up steam. I loved Rails and Ruby, but with so much invested in PHP (10 years back then) I decided to implement Rails-like patterns instead. Those patterns have matured a lot, but I stick to idea that the framework should be very light itself. Happy to answer more specific questions.

Also, I'm really excited about the idea of porting the framework/platform to languages like Python and Ruby. I think it's possible because it's so light weight, but time will tell. People might call me crazy for that one, but I've been dreaming about a multi-language platform for years.

julien_c3• 14 years ago

What about frontend? Are you using an MVC framework?

ericingram32• 14 years ago

Another concept in Forward that is new, REST-like models. The base Model defines 4 public methods:

    get(uri, data)
    put(uri, data)
    post(uri, data)
    delete(uri, data)

It's easy to code a model around this pattern, and the result is a system that functions entirely without procedures from the template's perspective.

For those used to WordPress style functions in templates, this model accomplishes something similar, but again without functions.

obayesshelton• 14 years ago

Why should a developer or a contributor pay to help develop something for the community ? seems a little too money making and less community driven.

whalesalad4• 14 years ago

What the fuck? Are you joking? We now live in a world where developers bust their asses to deliver 99 cent applications. It's fucked. Slowly, here and there, we're beginning to see a shift. People will pay for a great product, especially if it makes your job as a hacker/developer easier.

Play with the demo for 60 seconds. How long would it take you to build that? How much do you charge per hour? I built a lightweight ORM for pymongo/mongodb last weekend from an empty .py file. It was fun, but it was challenging and took pretty much the entire weekend. And it's basic. You can find, find_by_id, find_one, and a few other things. What these guys have done is tremendously impressive and difficult to do. They deserve every right to ask for money and that will only fuel further development.

Everyone has to keep the lights on at some point.

ericingram32• 14 years ago

You get at the core of the issue here, which is that we can save developers a huge amount of time with the right mix of pre-built components and dedicated developer support.

All of our paid options surround the idea that developers can go faster and better leverage their time with time-sensitive help. We've all become used to Stackoverflow saving the day, but if the answer doesn't magically pop up in Google, we can waste many hours chasing it needlessly.

I hope the future is full of paid open source options.

ericingram32• 14 years ago

I understand this sentiment. The goal of Forward is different than what you're probably used to in open source e-commerce.

We believe open source is ideal for most software, but community-only projects suffer from a lack of central ownership and support. I would adopt more open source solutions if there were professional developer support available. That's our goal here.

We want to be there when a developer needs help. No more empty support forums where you have to pray for someone to kindly answer your question.

At the same time, if you prefer to just take the code and run, that's fine too, we don't own these ideas :)

knodi• 14 years ago

Looks very cool.

Where is the source code repo for Forward? I take it its public as it says "open-source platform"

edit: nm i found the burb.

"Scheduled for public release in June 2013. The code will be 100% free forever, supported by our team plus a community of open source developers."

ericingram32• 14 years ago

Open source is important because it gives you freedom, but we want to have the resources to support developers before releasing code. Without support and great docs (which are coming), it would be a frustrating experience.

whalesalad4• 14 years ago

This is incredibly cool. The template syntax you have going is awesome. Reminds me of the natural language of haml/ruby with the handy pipe filter stuff of django/jinja. I can't stand mustache and handlebars.

The UI is great, it's responsive, and well thought out.

Also, the data modeling issue is a great selling point. Right now, MOST all applications are the same. Take this data, validate the person sending you the data is correct, validate the data is correct, and store it. Then apply the same methodology to fetching it, modifying it, or deleting it. I've been a django/python guy for years but after recently diving into Rails, I don't think anyone has done this any better. You can very quickly get things moving in CRUD/REST without much code.

That being said, it all comes back to the modeling. Modeling is relatively simple in Rails. The ORM you get with Django far exceeds ActiveRecord in usability but either way, at some point, a developer needs to sit down and define the data modeling. I realize you're marking this to developers (obviously) but I feel like with your cool UI and mongodb backing, you might even be able to expand this to administrators of the service.

Meaning, I can deliver a pre-configured product to my clients but if they want to add some fields to a product that are searchable/sortable/validatable/etc... they won't need to wait for me to do it. They won't need to wait for me to deploy it. I won't need to run a migration script.

Modern REST frameworks typically work based on a separation of a model and a resource. The model handles data storage and representation, and the resource handles serving it up, controlling access, etc... I think we need to couple these together. One unified object. I can create something, like a `Product`, give it some properties, set validations and permissions for those properties, and boom. Done.

Things like this and Meteor are shining examples of the radical change that we need in this current era of development. Yes, you guys will find faults in that statement. The neckbeards will come out and tell me mongodb does not scale, or node.js async development does not make sense. That is not the point. The point is that we're really not making it much easier on ourselves to build the things we want. Right now it makes more sense for me to pay Parse to handle an iOS back-end. Why? Because for the most part building it is a pain in the ass.

It doesn't need to be. I'm excited about Forward, very excited.

randallsquared• 14 years ago

I can't stand mustache and handlebars.

Why do you dislike them?

Separation of design and code seems pretty important, so having a template system that's really a (more or less limited) programming language of its own seems like a step backward to me.

ericingram32• 14 years ago

I thought about this a lot, believe me. Is it right to allow a template to have so much control? The side effect of not having it is, designers can't do anything without a back-end programmer.

Instead, Forward aims to make templates expressive and easy to understand by anyone. Time will tell if this causes problems, but for the projects we've built with it over the last year, it has been good and easy to maintain as there is no procedural connection between template/back-end.

whalesalad4• 14 years ago

Honestly the django/jinja syntax and library of helpers/filters is virtually impossible to beat.

    ### Example User

    user: {
      name: "Michael",
      bio: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.",
      products: [<Product>, <Product>, ... ]
      joined: "09-07-12"
    }

    <table>
    {% for user in users %}
      <tr class="{% cycle 'odd' 'even' %}">
        <td class="user-name">{{ user.name }}</td>
        <td class="user-bio">{{ user.bio|truncatewords:3 }}</td>
        <td class="user-products">{{ user.products.count }} Product{{ user.products.count|pluralize }}</td>
        <td class="user-joined">{{ user.joined|date:"M jS, Y" }}</td>
      </tr>
    {% endfor %}
    </table>

    ### Would Display

    <tr class="odd">
      <td class="user-name">Michael</td>
      <td class="user-bio">The quick brown ...</td>
      <td class="user-products">2 Products</td>
      <td class="user-joined">September 7th, 2012</td>
    </tr>

ericingram32• 14 years ago

It's awesome to see that others are thinking about this stuff too, really, I'm excited you are excited.

> you might even be able to expand this to administrators of the service.

There is already a channel/entry system much like that of ExpressionEngine, and administrators can create new channels in the Admin, specify which fields belong in it, and start storing/searching documents without a line of code. Again, thanks to ExpressionEngine for the inspiration on that one.

So far we've used channels to manage things like: Blogs, Knowledge base, Staff procedures, Bug reports, Customer reviews, and much more. It's early still but I expect the channel/entry thing to be a huge feature for administrators.

Also for developers, channels/entries make it really easy to mockup new features without writing a new data model. For example...

    {put $params.custom_data in "/entries/custom-data"}

It just works. This entry will appear in the Admin and can be fetched again with get("/entries/custom-data")

rushabh• 14 years ago

Shameless plug, but I have been writing such a framework for quite sometime now. It has all the self-defining goodness you ask for - you can edit the models (a model is a model) via the admin interface. Also has an integrated front-end and back-end, so you can seamlessly share models in the client and push updates etc.

https://github.com/webnotes/wnframework

Its complex and not documented. It is primarily built for an small business accounting + inventory app we publish (ERPNext, demo - http://demo.erpnext.com/)

tegansnyder• 14 years ago

This looks promising. Having worked with Magento for a few years now I appreciate the thought you put into the UI and the choice of MongoDB is excellent.

ericingram32• 14 years ago

Thank you, I'd be really interested to get you working with the current version. I'm looking for Magento developers that can help connect the dots with that community. E-mail eric at getfwd if you're interested.

madarco• 14 years ago

You should have said that with "Free style templates" what you really mean is a BPEL.

The first time I've seen the project I've thought "oh no, another MVC framework!"

Now that I've seen the {put [status => "shipped"] in "/orders/12345"} I think it's cool.

ericingram32• 14 years ago

You have a good point here, and we will share a lot more details around the template code on our blog soon. I hadn't heard specifically of BPEL but will check that out.

We went with the MVC pattern to leverage ours and others' experience in that architecture, but there is almost no typical MVC boilerplate to deal with in Forward.

You just create a new template file, like "mypage.html", and go, just like you would with raw HTML mockups. If you prefer to write controllers you can. If you want to write custom data models (for something like this {put [something] in "/my-custom-model"}), you can, but you don't have to.

This is meant to make it easy for less technical designers to move fast without having to learn MVC patterns.

ericingram32• 14 years ago

MongoDB makes deleting records easier. Forward has a trash can:

    {get $order from "/orders/123"}

    {put $order in "/trash"}

Now the order is no longer in the "orders" collection in MongoDB, instead it's in the "trash" collection. You can still get it by ID though:

    {get $order from "/orders/123"}
    {$order|dump} -- Still here! But not really here.

We can just as easy pull the document out of the trash and put it back where it was.

It's the reason you see we can delete documents without even a warning in the demo (http://demo.getfwd.com).

jontas2• 14 years ago

I have recently been evaluating e-commerce platforms for an upcoming project. This looks very nice, but it seems to be missing one key piece of functionality: variable products. For example, shirts that come in three sizes and three colors (so 9 combinations, each with their own SKU and inventory level).

I guess since it is open source, if I want this added, I should put my money where my mouth is and add it myself. Maybe one day, if I ever have the time..

ericingram32• 14 years ago

It does have this functionality, but so far we've used it in different ways. What you see in the Demo admin is not all there is, but since it's meant to customize, certain features aren't visible in this version.

My last e-commerce business was a fashion site (http://redtagcrazy.com/blog) built on a custom platform, and we dealt with variations of course, but so far only one of the early sites we built on the platform needed this feature (and they have it).

Edit: I would add that Forward aims to be full-featured, and anything you might reasonably expect out of the box in something like Magento, will be available in one form or another.

jontas2• 14 years ago

That is good to know, thanks!

I have also built totally custom ecommerce platforms in the past (getbuckyballs.com) and I understand many of the difficulties involved. I think you guys have done a great job with this, I hope I have a project that can use it.

rburhum3• 14 years ago

I had my e-commerce website ( http://www.modewalk.com ) opened in a tab when I opened yours. Funny enough, our favicons are very similar :)

ericingram32• 14 years ago

Hey that's cool! Great looking site too, I'd be interested to know how you built it.

rburhum3• 14 years ago

Python/Django/Fabric/Celery/Redis/PostgreSQL/SphinxSearch/jQuery/Sass/AWS/Jenkins/Selenium/etc and a lot of stress/tears/joy hahaha

zoneinfinite2• 14 years ago

Will this e-commerce platform support digital file download/delivery?

ericingram32• 14 years ago

Definitely, the goal is to support all of the most common e-commerce models (standard, drop ship, subscription, private sale, etc) out of the box and free. There may be different default admin versions to start with also, but the admin is easy to modify for anyone with HTML knowledge, so it's expected that certain features will work differently for different models.

MongoDB makes this much easier because the database only needs to know about the way you are using it, and not the various other ways that unrelated businesses might use it.

Digital file delivery is on the roadmap now (will publish this in the near future).

zoneinfinite2• 14 years ago

Thanks! I am really looking forward to using Forward (no pun intended). It looks so damn good. I think your solution is what LemonStand cart is TRYING to be but is not quite there in my opinion (and probably will never be).

ericcholis• 14 years ago

Damn you! I'm about a month away from re-launching an ecommerce site in MongoDB. I probably could have used this six months ago :-)

Oh well, very nice product, glad to hear of yet another use-case for MongoDB and ecommerce.

ericingram32• 14 years ago

I knew there had to be others building e-commerce with MongoDB, but have seen very little of it so far. We've be happy to help you in the future if your site can benefit from it.

camurban• 14 years ago

Congrats! This is truly awesome.

ericingram32• 14 years ago

Thanks Cam :)

yakshay• 14 years ago

Looks incredibly cool. What JS library/framework is this using?

ericingram32• 14 years ago

Only jQuery at the moment. The UI seems fast because MongoDB is very good with caching and speed in general, so it kind of feels like a client-side UI, but it's actually all server side rendering.

mrinterweb• 14 years ago

I thought that e-commerce was one of the things MongoDB said it would not be good for http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Use+Cases#UseCases-Whens... I love MongoDB and I use it on many of the projects I work on, but I'd want something transactional and ACID compliant when dealing with money and purchase tracking. How are you mitigating the risks of data integrity compromise when using Mongo?

ericingram32• 14 years ago

There are ways to perform document-level transactions using optimistic or pessimistic locking, in our experience so far this has been sufficient for purchase tracking. I imagine our perspective will mature as we get the system into higher load scenarios.

One of the reasons we decided to delay code release is that we need more time/resources to get it ready for the different ways developers will try to use it early on.

ewsplat• 14 years ago

Great effort, I'd love to see the finished product. I have been contemplating of migrating my own e-commerce platform (http://demo.embwebstores.com) to MongoDB and one of the new frameworks - Laravel.

I wonder if you found the lack of relational data an obstacle? Maybe not now but do you see it being a problem down the road?

ericingram32• 14 years ago

We didn't find the lack of relational queries an obstacle at all. The model in Forward handles relationships in a way that makes it feel easy. Model fields can be defined as a callback:

    // class Accounts ...
    'orders' => function ($account) {
        return get("/orders", [account_id => $account['id']]);
    }

Get an account, access the relationship:

    {get $account from "/accounts/123"}

    You have {pluralize "{$account.orders.count} orders"}

    {foreach $account.orders as $order}
        ...
    {/foreach}

This also works as expected:

    {get $orders from "/accounts/123/orders"}

It would be cool if you built your platform on Forward. Just sayin' :)

Show HN: MongoDB + open source e-commerce = Forward

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