At Field59, we believe transparency is important. Making sure your organization is comfortable with everything — from our sales proposals to our technology to our customer support — is built-in to who we are and what we do.
That extends to giving you a peek under the hood so you can see how the Field59 Video Manager operates. So I’m starting a series of blog posts that talk about the technology we use and why we use it. We’ll talk about our player, our search tools, our cloud insfrastructure, and more.
For the first post, I’ll focus on the database and framework.
Perhaps nothing is more important to a video content management system than the database. From what metadata is added to the videos, playlists and live streams in a customer’s Field59 account, to how that data is structured, saved, and stored, nothing can get into or out of the system (or make any sense really), without a good database. At Field59, we use MongoDB.
MongoDB (from “humongous”) is a scalable, high-performance, open source NoSQL database. It offers superior scalability and searching functionality. In addition, as we start to add more complex search functionality, we can easily add in additional tools.
The video manager application itself is built on the Symfony PHP framework.
This community-supported, open-source framework offers a base of standard functionality to speed development. Many features that we use — including login, security, database, and template functions — came pre-built, which allowed us to focus primarily on improving application-specific functionality. This has sped our development substantially (in fact when we switched to Symfony, we rebuilt the platform in just a few months compared to what originally took years). Symfony is also actively being developed and improved, so we can leverage the work that the community is doing, removing some of the development burden of keeping our application secure and updated.
Together, MongoDB and Symfony have allowed us to build a management application that is reliable, stable, and easy-to-use.