Object Management Group - Orlando Meeting
OMG General Plenary Session 6/10/98

CNN Interactive Presentation – presented as a CORBA success story.  It was given by Al Issa (aissa@developers.turner.com), Director of Software Development at CNN.  

Some statistics about CNN interactive

•	150,00 – 200,00 hits per minute.
•	77 million page views per week.
•	11.5 million users per month.
•	9% growth per month.
•	6 OC-3 lines out of their Atlanta, GA data center.

Development Needs

The CNN interactive development team’s primary responsibility was to create an on-line community with as little overhead as possible.  They were given the task of building a content management system (CMS) robust enough to handle the vast amounts of content that feed CNN’s web sites.  CNN Interactive produces content for its web sites as well as for other organizations. 

The development team exercised the concept of separation of content from presentation.  They created a data model for handling and storing content; then they created the views to that content.  Currently, CNN’s CMS generates view for its web sites, e-mail newsletters, pager services, etc.

CNN Interactive’s Content Management System (CMS)

The team created several services into their content management system.  Such services are interoperable and scattered across multiple systems.   They selected CORBA to provide the level of interoperability the CMS required.  

All the services are tied by the CORBA Event Service.  One such service takes news feeds from CNN, Reuters and the Associated Press (AP) and sends it to the Event Channel.   A classifier service then tags and catalogs each story.  Their page generation service is also built as a CORBA service.  It pairs predefined templates with the content stored in the CMS’s databases. 

Other services:

Distribution Service	Retrieves content [stories] from news wires such as CNN, Reuters and the Associated Press (AP).
	
Wires Postings Service	Similar to the Distribution Service.  It allows CNN to post stories on news wires.
	
Generation Service	Creates the HTML pages that are viewed on CNN’s web sites.  It also creates views for e-mail newsletters, pagers, etc.
	
Content Service	Stores and retrieves content from the CMS’s databases.
	
Publisher Service	Publishes the stories on the web sites.
	
Priority Service	Classifies stories as a cover story, leading story, etc.
	
Priority UI	Allows editors to manage the Priority Service.
	
Video Services	A multimedia service.  It is currently used in CNN Interactive’s WebTV pilots.
	
Magic Mover UI	Allows content providers to publish content by dragging and dropping an icon from their desktop.	

Developers at CNN Interactive are currently working on a Polling Service.  An NSAPI application takes poll results and submits it to this CORBA service.

CORBA has allowed developers at CNN to cut development time.  The development cycle at CNN interactive takes no more than 3-4 months.

NOTE: The development team has standardized on Netscape Enterprise server to power all of CNN’s web sites.  They also standardized on HTTP rather than IIOP because IIOP is currently being supported only by a small number of firewall vendors.  The majority of CNN’s users visit from behind corporate firewalls.

Questions and Answers

The issue of fault tolerance was raised by one if the meeting attendees.   CNN Interactive does not currently provide “fault tolerance”.  They however do provide a high level of redundancy.  Systems, especially those with CORBA services, are clustered to reduce down time to null.