There are many applications that run in front and behind the scenes at CBC.ca. Some of the applications that appear on the website include:

• Program Guide
• Weather
• My CBC
• Ticker (on the front page)
• Quick Poll
• E-Mail a Story

However there are many applications that run behind the scenes that the general public doesn’t interact with directly:

• Sportwire
• MRL
• Weekend News
• Web Cache
• News Delivery
• CUNG (Cache Updater, Next Generation)

All of the code for these applications are stored in a CVS Repository and is written in Java or Perl. This allows multiple developers to edit the same code and avoid conflicts. It also allows versioning and diffs (seeing the difference between two versions of code).
While all of the code is stored in CVS another two open source applications called CruiseControl and Maven allows us to automatically build and provide documentation.
During the QA and testing process bugs are tracked in software called Bugzilla.
Without the hard work of our developers many items that make CBC.ca an interactive destination would not be possible.
Let’s take a look at what some of this code does.

Sportwire
The sports section of our site includes pages where you can get the latest sport scores in real time (during a game). This includes scores for the NHL, NFL, NBA, MLB, and the CFL. We call these “scoreboards”.
The data processed by Sportwire is delivered to us from our data provider and then converted into SportsML format. SportsML is an international standard for storing sport scores in a file.
The next step involves writing the necessary data in HTML format to be displayed on the site.

MRL
MRL stands for “Media Resource Locator” and it is a tool that allows us to direct users to specific streaming servers using different business rules.
When you click on a link to watch on-demand or live content MRL will detect what network you are coming from and apply other rules (like which servers are full) and direct you to the server that will best serve your request.

Weekend News
The regional news pages are not updated over the weekend. In order to keep the news “fresh” on the page the content is updated automatically over the weekend with National News.
This is called “weekparting”.
An application makes sure that during the weekends only National news appears on the regional sites.

News Delivery
This is probably one of the oldest applications at CBC.ca News Delivery transforms our news stories (which is stored in a non-html format) into HTML and really any other format we’d like.
You can get any national story in three formats, HTML, XML, or text format. All you need to do is just change the file extension in the URL. For example, if you would like to see the Britain Downgrades Terror Threat article in text format, just change the url to:

http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2006/08/14/britain-threat.txt

Or in XML

http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2006/08/14/britain-threat.xml

It is currently in the process of being replaced.

CUNG
Cache Updater Next Generation (CUNG for short) is the application that delivers Election Results to our election pages in real time.
Just like Sportwire, it converts data from a provider into HTML pages. It updates this data in real time as the votes from each riding are tallied.

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