IEEE Spectrum Online Website
- Client: IEEE Spectrum Magazine
- Date: 5/2005-9/2005
Project Goals
- Increase ad revenue for IEEE Spectrum Online magazine
- Double online readership from 200,000/month to 400,000/month
Responsibilities
- Architecture and implementation of J2EE application
- Unit testing and acceptance testing to ensure codebase quality
- Integration with Vignette Enterprise Portal
- Integration with Accipter Ad server
- Integration with Akamai caching network
Key Features
- Custom page-level caching framework to maximize scalability to 100s of concurrent users in a very constrained environment (a heavily-shared, 2-machine cluster maintained by IEEE IT staff)
- Robust staging vs. production feature to allow editors and writers to preview the next month’s issue before going live
- System to override Vignette Portal to allow the use of meaningful site URLs
Results
- On-time, on-budget delivery
- Deployed since September 2005
- The Spectrum Online technical articles, although always thorough and in-depth, are now more popular in high-visibility places like Slashdot
Technologies
- Java, Oracle 10g, BEA Weblogic 8.1, Vignette Application Portal, JSR-168 Portlets, Hibernate, Tapestry, Selenium, Groovy, Hessian Web Services, OSCache, Velocity, Freemarker, RSS
Also Involved
-
Fergus O’Daly Associates (primary contractor)
- Marketing and advertising strategy
- Site design
- Client liaison
-
IEEE Operations staff * Deployment