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A comment on Scaling the BBC iPlayer to handle demand.

Re:Scaling the BBC iPlayer to handle demand by bruceboughton on Sunday September 05, 2010 @10:41AM (#1664587)
I'd be interested to hear why they chose PHP. (It's not exactly the framework-du-jour, so they must have positively chosen it).

Also, it seems to me that the web page serving would be the most trivial part of iPlayer. Scaling the video and recommendation database is probably a more interesting topic.

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Re:Scaling the BBC iPlayer to handle demand by points on Sunday September 05, 2010 @10:56AM (#1664606)
Shocking to hear that someone has chosen a tool based on its merits rather than how fashionable it is...
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Re:Scaling the BBC iPlayer to handle demand by bruceboughton on Sunday September 05, 2010 @02:28PM (#1664889)
Indeed. That's why I was asking for what reasons they chose PHP, i.e. what do they perceive it's merits to be.
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Re:Scaling the BBC iPlayer to handle demand by poundy on Sunday September 05, 2010 @11:21AM (#1664637)
Exactly the way I felt!
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Re:Scaling the BBC iPlayer to handle demand by pdw on Sunday September 05, 2010 @12:17PM (#1664707)
You might want to read aboout how web infrastructure works at the BBC: http://iamseb.com/seb/2007/12/perl-on-rails-why-the-bbc-fail...
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Re:Scaling the BBC iPlayer to handle demand by mst on Monday September 06, 2010 @04:39PM (#1667379)
I'd point out that the "perl+SSI" codebase was actually mod_perl, Catalyst, DBIx::Class etc. using SSI as a sort of primitive ESI replacement to ease caching of partial pages.

The strange politics that led to the perl on rails monstrosity apparently aren't universal.

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Re:Scaling the BBC iPlayer to handle demand by earnubs on Sunday September 05, 2010 @12:11PM (#1664695)
One reason might be the ability to hire quality developers in sufficient numbers. The BBC is big, with developers (both internal BBC and external contracts) working all over the UK on a wide range of output.
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Re:Scaling the BBC iPlayer to handle demand by MC27 on Sunday September 05, 2010 @03:00PM (#1664954)
That's what I was thinking. Ruby, Perl and Python are all fine alternatives if you can find people with those skills.
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Re:Scaling the BBC iPlayer to handle demand by chromatic on Sunday September 05, 2010 @06:07PM (#1665291)
... or train them.
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Re:Scaling the BBC iPlayer to handle demand by bl4k on Sunday September 05, 2010 @01:56PM (#1664833)
and any good developer can pick up and be proficient in PHP quickly
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Re:Scaling the BBC iPlayer to handle demand by poundy on Sunday September 05, 2010 @04:58PM (#1665160)
which is in my opinion PHP's greatest strength and greatest weakness. Weakness because not-so-good developers think they are good while writing code using register globals, no input validation, no escaping output, etc..
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Re:Scaling the BBC iPlayer to handle demand by kijinbear on Sunday September 05, 2010 @03:40PM (#1665021)
It's possible that somebody higher up with an enterprisey mindset just signed a deal with Zend. Including paid support and whatnot.
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