So we've gotten the green light to talk about all the fun stuff we're doing in the backend of Ning, which rocks as we are doing some cool stuff. This does mean, however, that I am posting to two blogs now, and I'm not sure the best way to handle that -- to some degree anything I post on the Ning Developer Blog is probably something that would fit well here (though I guess it may not be a waste of tie, so who knows). For now, I'll just post a teaser here and link :-)
So, we recently made a major release of the Ning Core. The Core, as we call it, is the platform stuff which provides all the services used by the playground (the PHP stuff). It is mostly written in Java and is (in my opinion) a fairly interesting distributed system.
The most recent change is mostly in how we handle data for a given application. In the past we have optimized heavily for supporting tons of fairly low load applications (the "Bullwinkle" system). With the "Rocky" core we made the changes to equally well support extremely popular and heavily used applications...
The rest is over there :-)