SKY TV sites now all built with Grails
Graeme revealed yesterday on his blog that SKY TV now use Grails for the main website, as well as their sub-sites.
Its great to see another recognized brand using Grails for their public facing websites.
Grails is brilliant because it works wonderfully for medium-sized websites as well as enterprise systems. It has nothing that restricts it to either of these markets.
October 3rd, 2008 at 10:08 pm
I would have imagined that a Content Management System would have better suited http://www.copellafruitjuices.co.uk/ and http://www.tropicana.co.uk/ instead of Grails.
October 5th, 2008 at 9:58 am
A CMS would have been useful but a) there isn’t one on the market that does what we need vis having lots of custom page layouts and lots of text panels etc, and b) we do plenty of other bits that are not pure CMS - data tracking, competitions (automated draws, notification of winners) among other things.
October 6th, 2008 at 6:32 am
That’s awesome! Is it possible to share the rough hardware specs behind the site? What plugins are being used? Is there a lot of front-end caching or hibernate caching being used?
October 6th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
I don’t know Mike, its not my site!
October 6th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
OK, sorry. It sounded like you were involved based on your first comment where you used ‘we’ in describing the decision around CMS.
October 7th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Hey Mike,
Grails 1.0.3
Plugins:
fckeditor
quartz
testing
webtest
searchable
selenium
jsunit
and a couple of hand written ones
tv.sky.com, movies.sky.com, showbiz.sky.com, sky1.sky.com all run off the same codebase just styled differently and different modules on each page. These four sites in a month get around 110 million hits in total.
They essentially have 4 production nodes that sit behind a load balancer and a cdn. Since the site is so read heavy compared to write heavy we cache as much stuff up the stack as possible. That means we use our CDN pretty extensively as well as caching at the load balancer. Those 4 web boxes are all vm’s that point to a cluster of 2 postgres db’s vms. We have one node that isn’t available to the outside that is used for our rich publishing system that the editors use.
What else would you like to know?