CNN Interactive

Contact:

Tools Used:
CORBA, IIOP, including Windows and Mac desktops, Windows NT, Sun Solaris and Netscape server platforms.

Benefits/Problems Solved:
CNN Interactive, a division of Cable News Network, has built and is deploying a system using CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) to gather, store and disseminate news material. The project has enabled the organization to tie together its various clients and servers that include Windows and Mac desktops, Windows NT, Sun Solaris and Netscape server platforms so that all internal users can access the material and all servers can talk to one another.

CNN Interactive employs over 150 people and is the largest development group in CNN. The group is responsible for all non-broadcast dissemination of news for CNN. The organization, is based in Atlanta, GA, and has machines running different platforms that are dispersed widely in their headquarters and also geographically dispersed throughout the North America and Europe as well as other locations throughout the world. Plus CNN Interactive distributes news to outside buyers, providing content to over 150 co-branded websites and to over 65,000 users in other news organizations.

This content comes in to CNN in a variety of formats such as text, video and audio as well as other electronic formats and must be stored and made accessible to CNN's internal users and external buyers of information. The sheer quantity of information and its variety of formats, and the variety of hardware and software being used by all the various clients who needed access to the information posed a huge challenge for CNN Interactive. How could they build a common environment that tied all their disparate systems together, make all the data accessible to different internal desktop environments and external buyers? The answer, after much searching and study was CORBA.

CNN investigated different ways of building distributed systems that satisfied their requirements and in autumn of 1996 built a pilot project using CORBA. They were so pleased with the results that they quickly began building CORBA applications for their production environment so that now the majority of their applications are CORBA based.

CNN Interactive has realized many benefits through its use of CORBA: Ability to build both clients and servers simultaneously and IDL interfaces allow them to be married together quickly and seamlessly. Time savings, ability to build clients and servers simultaneously is allowed because IDL interface works so well. Shortened development cycle Object reusability saves time, money and minimizes debugging of new programs.

CNN Interactive currently runs CORBA on 6 major systems, with plans to run it on more in 1998. New projects CNN Interactive has several other CORBA projects in development including a "poll server" that will tabulate the voting that CNN regularly conducts through their website. CNN Interactive's CORBA environment is working so well that CNN's broadcast division is now looking into using CORBA themselves.

Al Issa, Senior Manager of Software Development and Application Services at CNN Interactive, says that "CORBA is the only way to go for distributing to CNN's complex systems." News and information are received in various media formats including text, audio and video as well as other electronic formats. These are wrapped into CORBA objects which can be stored and easily retrieved by clients using a variety of clients including Macs, Windows PCs.