British Broadcasting Corporation
The world's largest broadcaster.
Overview
We helped to design and develop a generic microsite system that would stream DRM protected video content for various clients.
Technicalities
The system was implemented under Visual C++ as a series of COM+ components called from an ISAPI extension DLL. These components were responsible for carrying out business activities, producing results as XML documents that were transformed to HTML using an appropriate XSL. The behaviour and relationships between the components was driven by a series of database tables enabling each customer to obtain customised behaviour.To provide both performance and resilience the web sites operated from a series of load balanced servers necessitating the use of a centralised state storage mechanism. Each client had their own microsite (for collecting payments and issuing licenses for media) with XSL documents customised to their ‘look and feel’.
We designed and implemented the payment processing mechanism, based around a shopping cart. WorldPay were used to collect payment so that a license for viewing content could be issued.
Designed and implemented centralised session management mechanism used to share state data between the various servers running the system.
Design and implementation of database schema.