Technology

Tagged exists to serve members, so our architectural vision starts from the user interface. Client-side JavaScript programming is very important to ensure a smooth and snappy experience. We leverage PHP for rapid development of feature functionality, and as “glue” to assemble back-end services and data into a working product.

Massive scale is a recurrent theme that drives many of the design decisions at Tagged. We need to control costs while still serving millions of users and delivering billions of page views each month. We need to build very complex features that we know will work well with 2x, 10x, or even 20x as many servers.

We often use Java when we need to build stateful services, implement complex algorithms, execute with parallelism, or compute efficiently. The Tagged “Applications Platform” environment makes it simple to write stateful services that run in a shared environment and scale out very naturally.

We make heavy use of relational databases, and employ sharing across many instances to support scale-out growth. We are actively moving toward introducing non-relational database technology.

Architecture