Web Goal: See It Now

CBS News created a dynamic online application in one week with help from a database link

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By David Baum
Issue date: March 31, 1997

The pace of Web-site development can be relentless for many companies, with some needing to produce content under the tightest of deadlines. Such was the challenge for Web developers at CBS News when it decided to broadcast the 1996 U.S. election results online.

These scenarios are becoming increasingly common as organizations move into high gear to beat their competitors online. "There's often no time for a drawn-out ana lysis and design cycle," says Dean Daniels, VP and general manager of CBS New Media in New York. "With the Web, the idea is to get something up there-and fast."

The goal of CBS News' Web site was to provide Internet users with worldwide access to dynamically generated charts and graphs of election and exit-polling results for local and national races. But with one week to go before the elections, difficulties connecting CBS News' legacy database to real-time election data was posing problems. Time was running out.

Daniels and his 14 colleagues in the New Media group were already working with Silicon Graphics Inc. to establish the Web site's hardware infrastructure-a combination of single-processor and multiprocessor WebForce Challenge servers running the Unix operating system. The tricky part was connecting the Web servers to the rest of CBS News' information architecture. This required some fast database work behind the scenes. The Web pages had to be created on the SGI systems by dynamically connecting to a Microsoft SQL Server database running on a Windows NT computer where election results were stored. An existing stored database procedure within the SQL Server open client architecture was used to link the systems.

Then came the real challenge: CBS News wanted to generate these HTML pages in real time with updated election information every one to three minutes. "Given the volume of traffic being handled by these applications-and the cross-platform nature of the architecture-that was an ambitious goal," Daniels says.

Sound exotic? It isn't. Such software architectures are becoming common, fueling a growing desire for industrial-strength Web-to-database connectivity solutions. "One of the biggest trends within the Web and corporate intranets is to provide Web access to data warehouses and back-office systems," says Jeff Whitney, director of marketing at Bluestone Inc., the Mt. Laurel, N.J., Web-development company that worked with CBS News on its site. " Web sites increasingly rely on complex, database-driven content."

Daunting Challenges
With a week before the election, Bluestone was called in to help solve CBS News' Web-to-database integration problem. The tool: Its Sapphire/Web application-development environment. Given the time constraints, Bluestone's three-man development team faced a daunting set of challenges:

• Create a cross-platform information architecture consisting of Unix Web servers and Windows NT database servers;

• Generate complex, constantly changing HTML pages from the existing election database;

• Work within a rigid, predefined legacy database structure and stored procedures.

They pulled it off. Led by Ray Bentz, Bluestone's consulting manager, the team delivered a working prototype within 30 hours of first hearing of CBS News' dilemma. Sapphire/Web was used to create HTML pages dynamically from the database, supplying an architecture that made use of the existing subsystems at CBS.

Industry experts were impressed with the results. "For all the [CBS News] site does-and the fact that it comes from an established company with lots of existing back-end systems-it was an outstanding effort," says Stan La Peak, an analyst with the Meta Group, a consultancy in Stamford, Conn. "Sites produced this rapidly are generally not the public, high-visibility ones like CBS."

Reuse Is Key
The key to building a Web site fast, maintains Bluestone's Bentz, is reusing existing capabilities. "You can't afford to develop everything from scratch," he says. "We were able to leverage the existing database with its stored procedures, as well as the HTML code and JavaScript that CBS already created."

CBS News graphics artists had put together the HTML template, a complex specification that used JavaScript and image maps to present an active map of the United States. Moving the mouse over a state changed the page to show that state's name, then allowed for instant drill-down into its results.

Sapphire/Web's role: Pump live data into this template from the constantly changing SQL Server database. The biggest development challenge came with translating the complex set of data returned from the SQL Server's stored procedure so that it could be presented in HTML. Come election eve, the database was to be updated about 100 times a minute from a news service used by all the television networks.

Bluestone developers established an efficient design to deal with this dynamic environment. All static HTML pages and images were pre-loaded on each of the nine SGI Web servers, so that only the pages and images that changed needed to be updated. The only dynamic image was the .GIF file of the map of the United States.

Michael Ghould, VP and senior consultant with the Patricia Seybold Group, a consultancy in Boston, says Sapphire/Web was a good choice for the CBS News Web site. The software lets developers build Web applications and access databases with a minimum amount of programming using drag-and-d rop methods. It also encourages reuse of new and existing application objects, letting developers focus on the unique aspects of each application.

By the day before the election, the site's HTML pages were finalized by CBS News graphic artists. The application was pulling simulated election data from the database and generating the dynamic HTML pages. The pages were being replicated from the single SGI server at CBS News in New York to eight additional SGI Web servers across the country-a generation/ replication process designed to support a huge volume of traffic, says Jay Kidd, director of WebForce marketing in the Web products division of SGI.

At 5 p.m. on Election Day, the CBS News site cut over to the live commentary and poll data. Almost instantly, Web users flooded the site-several million hits in a span of just a few hours. But thanks to the solid application architecture and the power of the underlying Web servers, the election system worked as planned. Stephen Jacobs, CBS News' executive pro ducer, credited the technical team with enabling Web users to access only the election results they wanted as the vote counts were updated.

But Daniels and his colleagues aren't resting on their laurels. "Already, we're talking about the next stage," Daniels says. "This election application was a test bed for other Web exploits to come. We have a lot of legacy systems we need to access, which makes this type of application architecture a good fit for our ongoing plans."

The moral of the story: "Focus on quality, but don't expect perfection," Daniels says. "The Web is a medium that demands immediacy."

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