You'll often hear geeks talk about back-ends and front-ends.  In spite of the stereotypes they're not talking about the female anatomy.  What we're really talking about is the difference between what you see, and what's going on behind the scenes.  Still, what does that really mean?  Which is more important?  Where do we focus most of our attention?

None of these questions have simple answers.  So the best I can do is give some perspective about what is what.

A lot of what goes into an application like ZooLoo depends heavily on how people use the product.  Where people focus their time often dictates where the development team spends their time.  Some features are very back-end intensive.  Others have a much heavier dependency on the front-end.  Every day is a learning experience for us.  Spikes in traffic can give us a lot of information about our weak-points.  Lulls in traffic can also give us some valuable insights.  What we can never do is take anything for granted.  There are so many levels to a complex application and every one of them has to be carefully analyzed.  The data has to be reviewed, conclusions drawn, and action taken.

I'd like to be a little more transparent about these challenges with the ZooLoo users so that they know that we take all problems seriously.  We want a great product like the next guy.  We are in controlled beta for a reason.  Theory is great for writing lofty white-papers.  But nothing beats real-world data.  So, I'm going to share some of the challenges.

Very often it is taken for granted that real-world operations are far different than any test environment.  You can prepare as much as you want to for that big day.  You can go into that day very confident that you've covered all of the bases, dotted all of the I's and crossed all of the T's.  Then opening day comes and you're met with a few surprises.  Things that seemed rock-solid stable are suddenly getting flakey.  Little glitches and gremlins come out of the woodwork to taunt you.

Opening day here at ZooLoo went well overall.  We had about 3 hours of outage.  I know it's a controlled beta, and beta means instability issues, but you still feel horror when things go wrong.  It was a scary day at times.  However, in retrospect, it was a good day.  We managed to iron out the major issues.

And here we are.  Day one of ZooLoo has come and gone.  What's next?

So the techies out there might want to know what ZooLoo is built on.  I won't go into the proprietary details of what makes ZooLoo tick, but I will mention the open source products that it's built on.  Much of it is run-of-the-mill and what you'd expect from any web-based application.  Other parts of it might be surprising.

A lot of what we've chosen to use has been based on years of experience with many different products.  Collectively the engineering team has over 40 years of experience in many disciplines.  I bring up the team because all of that open source doesn't amount to much of anything unless someone molds it and shapes it into an application.  Each person plays a part in tying the pieces together.  We have back-end specialists, systems specialists, application specialists, and of course a couple of "jacks of all trades" on the team.

Through our experience not only with the various products we use, but through experience with each other we have crafted ZooLoo and have big plans for the future.  Some of it is pretty generic.  The impressive part, however, is what is ground-breaking.

There is a lot more to ZooLoo than meets the eye.  What you see on your screen right now is the last step in a large list of things that have to happen.  Often we visit a new site and the work behind the scenes is taken for granted.  The site just works.  I click "Tak-It!" and the message automagically arrives to the recipient's ZooLoo page.  Most of the code that's written has a very small result when it comes to the visuals.

For example, just to look at this single article in my blog the behind-the-scenes code has to first check if you have permission to see the blog page.  It then has to look up the article in a database, and pull out the correct information.  Then it has to separate the different parts out.  The title is separate from the content.  The data has to be formatted so it's human readable.  Then all of that content has to be put in to the right "box" on the page.  And how I've oversimplified that process.  In point of fact there is so much more that goes on.  A few more, in no particular order: determine if the viewer has a ZooLoo account, determine if they're logged in, determine what site or sites they own, determine if they're just a viewer of the blog, or are they the author of the blog, determine if they're a friend of the author, determine who can post comments, if anyone.  Then, determine if there are any pictures in the article.  If there are, which ones?  Fetch the images, put them in the right places.  And so on...

It could make a mind go numb.

For every thing you see a whole slew of decisions are made, and different paths are taken.

Because ZooLoo is a complete paradigm shift of the typical modus-operandi of today's personal online spaces, we've really had to think outside the box.  Bringing this all to you has been a monumental task that we are all very proud of.  We have so much more to bring.  We will never stop improving things.

The code for ZooLoo looks basically like a table of contents in a book.  Lots of brief (but powerful) statements indented to varying degrees.  It looks like a table of contents for a book that contains in excess of 1 million pages (assuming 10 pages per section, which is pretty average).  This table of contents would require over 1500 printed pages.

That's a LOT of code!

Hope you're enjoying it.

What makes ZooLoo so special?  Don't we have enough social networks?

ZooLoo is special because it is not a social network.  It has social network features, sure.  Social networks as they exist today seem to be about everyone else.  There's you, and your social network account and then there's everyone else finding you because they have some need to hook up.  They want really big friends lists.  You are lost in that effort.  It isn't about you at all.

Here at ZooLoo we've tried to address the impersonal nature of social.  When you go into a gathering place (a bar, a restaurant, etc.) you can choose to ignore others there except those you're sitting with.  People at those places generally leave you alone.  If you're uncomfortable you leave, and probably don't go back.  Even though you're in public, you still have control.  That's part of what ZooLoo is about.  The rest is about YOU.