On 4/22/07, Lamptey, Derryck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
RoR, spring, hibernate.... Dotnet, java, php, etc, etc. What is the real backstage story? I'd find it very informative for someone to give us non-BBC-backstagers (without violating what's left of the official secrets act) some sort of overview of how the (impressive) Beeb backstage infrastructure is put together. It would be interesting to hear in (episode 1) when it started, and what backstage technologies were used (episode 2) current infrastructure in the context of lessons learned, (episode x) future directions? I think that this would make a riveting series - the program director for "click online" might even get stuck in on this one! ...Lots of opportunities for us backstagers to engage in constructive and thought-provoking discussion... I am a newbie to the list, I hope that this is not a "RTFM" type of question!!
Derryck, Not your question, but you might like to know how Virgin Radio's websites work (since I know about this a bit, whereas the BBC's infrastructure is totally unknown to me): We have two live Windows streaming servers, two for on-demand, plus a Helix box, and a Shoutcast/Icecast box (both servers run on the same hardware). Lots of encoders feeding in to these. We have around six live webservers, and do fun stuff with Squid for our "images" server (i.virginradio.co.uk). Our webservers are balanced using a BigIP box, rather than the elegant round-robin DNS that I believe others use. In addition, we have two webservers, a database mirror, and two WM streaming servers in NYC, and routers in most of the major internet hubs (Amsterdam, Manchester, London, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, NYC). The NYC servers are not just for load-balancing but also act as disaster-recovery boxes should anything happen to Golden Square, and act as spurious reasons for our technical services department to go out and "upgrade" them. We're fully multicast-enabled, and I believe on IPv6 too. In terms of the technology we use: our streaming software is Visual Basic wrapped around Windows Media Encoders: the VB inserts some additional metadata into the stream and also manages all our now-playing functionality. Otherwise virtually every bit of software is PHP, and homegrown - our content management system, all the webstuff we've written, the lot. Key learnings are to minimise live database lookups, and remove them entirely on our high-traffic pages - replacing them with regular cron jobs that output easy-to-parse text files. Other key learnings are writing "widgets" - small, reusable, pieces of code for use throughout our website network - rather than hulking great bits of code. We stopped using a content-delivery-network for things like images, when we realised that some work with Squid would make that easier to bring back in-house, but we definitely benefit from leaving the simple, static, stuff to be served by simple server instances. We use PHP mainly for ease of finding great developers and designers, but also to be able to use open-source material. We will be contributing back - indeed, our version of the BBC Backstage website goes live very shortly, which will debut with a small and easy-to-use JavaScript animation tool. Our network is nowhere near as complex as the BBC's; but I hope that's a useful start and there's some useful info in here. -- http://james.cridland.net/
