Think Different

One of the key goals we set ourselves when we developed the new iPlayer was that it would have to be fast to use. We understand that any delay in getting you to the video is frustrating as the site is just a jumping off point into TV and Radio content. But how do we make things fast? Displaying a web page in the browser contains many steps, some we can control some we can't. Time spent for the request and response travelling over the network we can't control, but we can control how long the pages take to generate and how large they are. We also have a degree of control over how long those pages can take to render in your browser. We had our work cut out for us on the new version of iPlayer. Personalised websites require much more processing power and data storage The current site uses one back-end service that we pull data from to build the pages. The new site uses many more, and we both post and pull data from them. This means that every returning user gets a differ...

PHP in the enterprise PHP claims to be the most widely used programming language on the web. A quick look at http://langpop.com/ supports this – it’s almost certainly the most common for smaller web projects. PHP was not originally designed as an enterprise-level language, but as it has evolved, it has become suitable for much larger projects than were originally envisaged when Rasmus Lerdorf produced PHP/FI in 1995 (source). PHP now supports SOAP, XML-RPC, JSON and any database platform you care to mention. For something to be considered “Enterprise-level”, i.e. ready for use in the enterprise, it should meet the criteria of the Enterprise Challenges examined in our previous blog post. PHP as an Enterprise-level language With PHP 5.3, PHP is a full object oriented language with exception handling and useful features such as closures. Let’s take a look at PHP in light of enterprise challenges. Scalability PHP is very scalable owing to its shared nothing architecture – ...

Matt McDonnell wrote about the new BBC Topic Pages Beta . I'd now like explain how some of the many components that build those pages all work together. The point of the Topic Pages is that they bring together content from all around bbc.co.uk . Obviously, many different systems produce all that content, and in general they don't tend to share content very well. Our challenge was to build a platform that could make sense of the different interfaces to those systems to make sharing that content easier. The first thing to note is that the Topic Pages themselves are dynamic , unlike the vast majority of pages on bbc.co.uk. Essentially, this means that the HTML of the page isn't stored as a physical file on a hard-disk, but instead is built up dynamically when the page is requested. This is done by the "Page Assembly Layer" or "PAL", a brand new component written in the PHP programming language . In the future, the intention is that most pages on bbc.c...

The World Cup 2010 website is a significant step change in the way that content is published. From first using the site, the most striking changes are the horizontal navigation and the larger, format high-quality video. As you navigate through the site it becomes apparent that this is a far deeper and richer use of content than can be achieved through traditional CMS-driven publishing solutions. The site features 700-plus team, group and player pages, which are powered by a high-performance dynamic semantic publishing framework. This framework facilitates the publication of automated metadata-driven web pages that are light-touch, requiring minimal journalistic management, as they automatically aggregate and render links to relevant stories. Dynamic aggregation examples include: Frank Lampard England Squad Group C Fixtures and Results Groups and Teams The underlying publishing framework does not author content directly; rather it publishes data about the content - metadata . Th...

The Zend Framework, developed by Zend Technologies is an open-source, object oriented web-application framework implemented in PHP 5. It is widely known as ZF and is developed with the purpose of making things easier for PHP developers and supporting best practices at the same time. CakePHP too, is an open-source web application framework used for creating web applications written in PHP. It is developed by Cake Software Foundation, Inc. It is written in PHP and is based on the model of Ruby on Rails. Zend Framework has easy methods of licensing with the new BSD license and a swift and well-tested code base that your business can rely upon. It makes use of commonly available APIs from well known vendors like Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, Flickr and API providers and catalogers such as StrikeIron and Programmable Web. ZF offers a simple component library to provide 80 percent of the functionality mostly needed by developers. The rest of the 20 percent can be altered as per your requirement...

The Zend Framework, developed by Zend Technologies is an open-source, object oriented web-application framework implemented in PHP 5. It is widely known as ZF and is developed with the purpose of making things easier for PHP developers and supporting best practices at the same time. CakePHP too, is an open-source web application framework used for creating web applications written in PHP. It is developed by Cake Software Foundation, Inc. It is written in PHP and is based on the model of Ruby on Rails. Zend Framework has easy methods of licensing with the new BSD license and a swift and well-tested code base that your business can rely upon. It makes use of commonly available APIs from well known vendors like Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, Flickr and API providers and catalogers such as StrikeIron and Programmable Web. ZF offers a simple component library to provide 80 percent of the functionality mostly needed by developers. The rest of the 20 percent can be altered as per your requirement...

I ndia has potential to emerge as the global competency centre for cloud services, says Microsoft. India , with its powerful ecosystem of over 1300 independent software vendors (ISVs), 1.4 million developers and more than 11000 system integrators (SIs and custom software development organizations), is ideal to tap this growing opportunity. As a result, an additional 300,000 jobs related to cloud services are estimated to be created in India over the next 5 years. A study by global consultants, Zinnov estimates the global cloud computing market to be over $70 billion by 2015. Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft Corporation said, "India will not only see a surge in consumption of cloud services, driving growth in domestic IT usage, but companies all over the world will look to India to support their transition to cloud computing." Microsoft's cloud infrastructure supports over one billion customers and 20 million businesses globally. Leaders from the industry and academia a...