4. What is it?
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Website for children aged 4-6
An aggregate view of BBC content
2 million unique users a week
High UX demands, our audience cry’s
Built using PHP and a long forked version of Zend MVC
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6. •
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Large legacy codebase
The Issues
Cutting edge in BBC at time
Original developers long gone
Hard to work on new features with confidence
Quality of tests vary
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Retro fitted on top
Hard to do well with the existing codebase
PHP’s not designed for aggregating data from multiple restful services
Business needs have changed
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8. What we done on our summer holiday
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Clear message to management
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What the problems were
What we should do about it
What they should expect
Used experience and judgement for recommendations
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Time critical - we were in trouble
No beauty competitions
Had clear justifications
Confidence and decisiveness gave management confidence for a spike
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9. Play framework
Why did we choose it?
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Scala
Full stack Web Framework
Reactive architecture is great when calling web services, non blocking - fits
exactly our problem type
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Typed template system is amazing
Lots of industry buzz
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10. The First Spike
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Addressed stakeholder concerns:
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Business value of the product is in the front end
Could show (visually) immediate progress
Backends aren’t (visually) impressive
Created responsive templates from a mocked data layer
Setup basic build pipeline to AWS - immediate productivity impact
Demonstrated skills transfer to existing team members
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11. The First Spike
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Success!!!
Compelling enough to have our stakeholders commitment
A 2 man team of Java/Scala + PHP/Javascript
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Collaborate effectively
Become productive quickly
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12. Moving forward
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How do we take a team of developers into Scala?
How do we resource?
How do we manage the risks?
AND
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How to migrate smoothly from the previous Apache/Tomcat platform???
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13. The Team
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Started small - 3 developers
Split frontend/backend
PHP focused on front end to get familiar (avoid Scala overload)
Backend started out Java-like with Scala’s syntactical sugar
Big recruitment drive
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14. The New Architecture
[Should be pretty diagram here]
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Version Control - GIT
Build - Jenkins
Deployment - AWS
Continuous Delivery (almost)
App and Web server - Play 2
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15. … after rethinking
Started with
Ended with
Varnish
AWS ELB
Nginx + mod_pageseed
Nginx + mod_pageseed
Play
Play
…overthought the problem
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Play
Play
16. Risky business
We’re doing things differently not necessarily new
(Going outlaw but in a nice Robin Hood kind of way)
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Heavy use of Java in the BBC. Extensive expertise on the JVM
Already some use of AWS for internal systems
Extensive change was unavoidable - regardless of the change was
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17. The approach
No more tears - set by Editorial
children's not developers tears
(or product managers or development managers)
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Iterative
Discrete
Tough editorial demands
Tough editorial timeframes
Tough audience!
18. The approach
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Distinct vertical sections
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Index pages after content
pages
A section at a time
Updated content item pages
first
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19. The approach
Vertical Plugins
DAO/
DAO/
DAO/
DAO/
DAO/
DAO/
DAO/
Templates Templates Templates Templates Templates Templates Templates
Play allows
modularisation
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Can develop in
isolation
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Game Songs Makes Storie Watch Radio Shows
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Can deploy in
isolation
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Can test in
isolation
Default Theme Templates
Data Access Libraries/Templates
Horizontal Plugins
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20. Keeping it real (simple)
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Local in memory cache
Used Guice rather than Cake
Simpler, less boilerplate
More familiar for Java devs
Runtime configuration changes possible
Opted out of some “kitchen sink” components in Play
Started at the view/templates to drive design
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21. Where we are now
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We have our first live release.
First public facing AWS + Scala Application
Management buy in for new model with Continuous Delivery
Stakeholders very happy with turnaround of features
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22. Things we’ve learnt
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Hit a few small bugs in Play
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Open source makes it easier to find root cause
Vast number of base libraries/products
Constantly learning
Scala’s cool factor makes it easier to recruit
Some things are hard to test in Play out the box
It’s easy to get carried away with idiomatic Scala
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Constant engagement with stake holders managing a risky move
PHP Developers have found it hard
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Syntax / FP concepts appear scary/overwhelming
Patterns such as DI are new
Lots of Scala tries to be academically clever
Java developers
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Find certain aspects hard being different (testing)
Can sometimes get carried away with new power sacrificing simplicity
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