The Weather Channel Launches New Site
Under The Hood
by Joe Badenell, Vice President Architecture for TWC
Atlanta, GA - For most people these days, if you are looking at a web site and thinking about the technology behind it, something has gone wrong. For the rest, you may wonder how our site works and what this redesign means from the IT standpoint. This redesign was a big effort for the weather.com IT team and took place at the same time as another huge project, the replacement of our Ad serving system that launched in April. Between those two projects, every page on weather.com has been updated both visually and under the hood. In addition to the improvements in the visual design and usability of the weather.com site, this redesign has also provided an opportunity to break with 11 years of legacy code and start a new application for all future development. What you see at weather.com today is actually two separate Web sites that, depending on what page you ask for, serve from either the new or the old codebase. The two sets of pages share the same updated visual elements, but as we add pages to the new application over time you will see new features and capabilities that would not be possible or practical in the old codebase.
The new application, which today serves the Home Page and Default Weather page, uses the latest techniques to improve the speed with which pages are delivered and rendered in your browser. This includes waiting to execute JavaScript until after the visual elements in the page have loaded, only making the parts of the page that are visible part of the initial page load, and increased use of client side and network caching of images, scripts, and page fragments. We are also loading the ads after the rest of page now to speed things up.
Another key goal for our new application was to make it easier for our developers to work in, both while creating new pages and making changes to existing ones. This will allow us to bring you new products more quickly and will reduce the number of bugs that get in your way while using our site. Most of these gains are based on stricter coding practices, updated page creation methodologies, and having the opportunity to start over and do things right the first time One of the things that did not change with the redesign is weather.com's use of Open Source software to run our high-volume Web site. We still use Linux, Apache's Web server and Tomcat Java application server, MySQL databases, and countless other programs, tools, and libraries from the Open Source community. But even resting on the same underlying infrastructure, the new weather.com application is significantly faster and more scalable than the previous one, so that we can be there for you through hurricanes, blizzards, floods, and nice sunny days alike.
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