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dCS Product Overview
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Chapter 7
CS-Direct: Sample Implementation
CyberMovieCentral is a fictitious company that publishes several online movie magazines. One of the primary reasons they picked dCS is because it would allow them to publish the same articles in multiple magazines. This chapter focuses on the initial project, which is to design and launch a movie-themed magazine named Lumiere's Light. We're going to assume that an SI was already chosen, the hardware and network have already been picked, the software has already been installed, and the development staff has already been trained.
Develop the Web Site
Our cast of characters to develop the site is as follows:
These characters all perform their work on the development system.
Identify the Content to Serve
Archie the architect is in charge of the SI team that is implementing Lumiere's Light. He must first study the content that Lumiere's Light will serve. The magazine features movie reviews and articles about movies. Images accompany each movie article and movie review. Content also includes film trailers.
For each movie review, Archie must track information such as the movie's title, the director, the article's headline, the author, the genre, the stars, and so on. In addition, an image accompanies each movie review.
The content for the magazine comes from a large staff of journalists and film reviewers, plus a news wire. The movie trailers come from movie studios.
Pick Asset Types to Represent the Content
Archie needs to decide which asset types will represent the content for Lumiere's Light. He can use or modify the asset types that come with Burlington Financial (BF), or he can create new asset types. The following table summarizes Archie's decisions:
Table 7: Asset Types to Represent Content in Lumiere's Light
Not all content is going to be represented in an asset. For example, the following pieces of content in Lumiere's Light will not be represented as an asset type:
Define Assets to Manage the Content
To manage content, Archie will rely on some core asset types that accompany CS-Direct. Archie does not have to define or modify these asset types, but he will create multiple assets of the following asset types:
Table 8: Asset Types to Help Manage Content in Lumiere's Light
For example, Archie's SI team will create several Query assets to perform searches such as the following:
- Find all the Article assets created in the last 24 hours.
- Find all the MovieReview assets in the Drama genre.
Create Templates to Render the Assets
Archie the architect is a wizard at solving technical problems, but he isn't as good with visual design as his good friend Weber the web designer. Weber is extremely comfortable with HTML and doesn't mind doing light XML programming. Weber works closely with the marketing team at CyberMovieCentral to design the look of Lumiere's Light. Then, he begins writing templates to implement that look.
Weber decides to create the templates shown in the following table:
Table 9: Templates for Lumiere's Light
Weber creates most of the templates by copying and modifying analogous templates from the Burlington Financial sample site. A few templates, such as LLTrailerTemplate, have no equivalent in Burlington Financial, so Weber creates those from scratch. The dCS Developer's Guide is a helpful resource for building templates.
The LLHomePageTemplate lays out the home page as shown in
Figure 35 . Note that the LLHomePageTemplate calls the following additional templates:
- LLArticleSynopsisTemplate -- to render the shortened version of the main article
- LLArticlesCollectionTemplate -- to render the collection of six article headlines
- LLReviewsCollectionTemplate -- to render the collection of four review headlines
In addition, LLHomePageTemplate also renders the top logo, the bottom advertisement, and the navigational section (the Comedy, Drama, News, and Reviews buttons).
Figure 35: Layout for LLHomePageTemplate template
Set Up the Management Site
With development just about completed, it is time for Alice the administrator to set up the management system. On the management system, Alice will need to perform tasks such as the following:
Add Users and Roles
Alice the administrator uses the dCS GUI to create the following users within the site:
Then, Alice uses the dCS GUI to create the following roles:
Alice assigns each user a role within the Lumiere's Light site. Note that each of these users might play different roles in other sites at CyberMovieCentral.
Create the Workflow Process
Alice works with her management team to determine the workflow. Alice, whose penmanship is flawless, uses a pen to sketch the following diagram on the back cover of an old, no-longer needed C manual:
Figure 36: Alice's workflow chart
Alice the administrator quickly automates the flow of articles and reviews from one user to the next. Consulting a well-worn online version of the dCS Administrator's Guide, Alice uses the dCS GUI to create the following states and steps:
States
Steps
Alice then creates some workflow privileges, and before long, the Lumiere's Light site has an article workflow process.
Add and Modify Content
The employees of CyberMovieCentral perform the roles that Alice the administrator has assigned. Gervase and Joanne write articles and reviews and Ed edits them.
Pedro the publisher runs queries so that he can create collections of articles and collections of reviews. Pedro than ranks each of the assets in these collections.
Add Newswire Content
A lot of the content for Lumiere's Light comes from an automated newsfeed (a newswire). To populate the database, Archie writes a program that parses each article--as it was received--into well-formed XML. For example, suppose the following article arrived on a newswire:
"Ingmar and Knotts Score Big" Category: Comedy Reviewer: Bjorn Carlson Movie Title: "Bjarne of Maybury" Director: Ingmar Bergman Writer: Don Knotts Starring: Andy Griffith, Liv Ullman, Lili Taylor Released: 2000 Who'd have thought that angst-ridden Swedish director Ingmar Bergman would have been such a big fan of the old Andy Griffith show? "I grew up with it, but then again, who didn't?" Bergman noted at the grand premier in Mt. Airy, North Carolina. He then launched into a dead-on accurate imitation of Jim Nabors' beloved Gomer Pyle character in Swedish.Archie's program converts that article into the following well-formed XML:
<DOCUMENT> <HEADLINE>"Ingmar and Knotts Score Big"</HEADLINE> <CATEGORY>Comedy</CATEGORY> <REVIEWER>Bjorn Carlson</REVIEWER> <MOVIE_TITLE> "Bjarne of Maybury"</MOVIE_TITLE> <DIRECTOR> Ingmar Bergman</DIRECTOR> <SCREENWRITER>Don Knotts</SCREENWRITER> <STARS>Andy Griffith, Liv Ullman, Lili Taylor</STARS> <RELEASE>1999</RELEASE> <ARTICLE> Who'd have thought that angst-ridden Swedish director Ingmar Bergman would have been such a big fan of the old Andy Griffith show? "I grew up with it, but then again, who didn't?" Bergman noted at the grand premier in Mt. Airy, North Carolina. He then launched into a perfect imitation of Jim Nabors' beloved Gomer Pyle character in Swedish. </ARTICLE> </DOCUMENT>Archie then sets up Content Server to call the XMLPost utility every hour. This utility takes the well-formed XML as input and automatically places the parsed XML into the appropriate tables of the dCS database. Once in the dCS database, the newswire articles can be used like any other asset.
Publish the Content
Ultimately, it is time to publish the next edition of Lumiere's Light. After making his choices, Pedro clicks the Publish button. The LLHomePageTemplate renders the home page shown in
Figure 37 .
Figure 37: The rendered home page of Lumiere's Light
Like many companies, CyberMovieCentral starts off using Export-to-Disk publishing to create a static delivery site. As their needs expand, CyberMovieCentral ultimately switches to mirror publishing in order to create a dynamic, personalized delivery site.
Improve Performance Through CS-Satellite
As more and more customers flock to Lumiere's Light, CyberMovieCentral begins to think about expanding hardware to meet the demand. After evaluating performance needs, Archie the architect has two choices:
- Buy one or more additional big machines to reduce the load on the current Content Server machine.
- Buy several small machines, each running CS-Satellite.
After comparing the price/performance graph, Archie chooses the latter option. CyberMovieCentral purchases four low-end machines and installs CS-Satellite on each of them.
After installing CS-Satellite; Alice adds a load balancer to the corporate network. The load balancer feeds requests to the different CS-Satellite hosts. Because the SI team originally used the "best practices" for coding described in the dCS Developer's Guide, there is no need to recode for CS-Satellite.
Summary
Using CS-Direct and basic assets, the CyberMovieCentral team quickly assembled Lumiere's Light. To see how the owners of Lumiere's Light extended their web site to sell movies, read the next chapter.
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