Product Launch: The new Billboard.com!

In late 2008, Billboard hired Razorfish to help redevelop our Product Strategy and design a new user experience for billboard.com.  I was responsible for all Billboard's Technology and Development for this project.  We completed the project in July 2009, in under 8 months.

This project was unlike any previous project at Nielsen Business Media.  We re-designed our entire infrastructure as well as build process, tools, JDK and frameworks.  The technical requirements for this site required a stronger infrastructure to support the expected traffic and my team and I decided that this was the best opportunity to bring Nielsen Business Media's technology framework up to date.

For our infrastructure and build system, we upgraded our application servers to Weblogic 10, and updated our JDK to JDK 1.6+.  This gave us significant performance improvements to our application servers and gave us flexibility with the new features of JDK 1.6 that we did not have in JDK 1.4.  We also installed Maven with some ant customizations as our primary build platform utilizing Atlassian's Bamboo as our continuous build system.  Bamboo not only ensures a compile-level build compliance from all our developers, but we also used it as our build deployment tool, cutting our production deployment time from nearly 2 hours down to under 20 minutes.

We had attempted to migrate our legacy framework from JDK 1.4 to JDK 1.6, but met with significant obstacles.  We decided then to drop our legacy framework and re-write our core framework utilizing Spring.  Our development team had very little experience with Spring, but we stepped up and came up to speed quickly.  With Spring to help us develop more consistently and faster and with maven to ensure the integrity of our build dependencies, we were able to build up a new set of application libraries quickly.

Within this project, we also decided to in order to allow the editors to take full control of the site, we had to update our custom CMS [Stylus].  We decided to rebuild Stylus utilizing jQuery, extJS and AJAX as our primary front-end development and rebuild the backend services in Spring. 

This site is AJAX heavy and built this way to allow for a non-interrupted music playing experience for the Billboard.com user.  All aspects of this site from analytics, to ads are updated by the front-end engine built in javascript utilizing jQuery. 

Since launch, the total site traffic has increased by over 30%, with time on site increasing by over 100%.

Link: www.billboard.com

Company: Billboard

Technology: AJAX, extJS, jQuery, JSTL, JSP, Spring, J2EE, Weblogic, Oracle, Linux