We have just launched a Play 2 website

Grant

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Nov 26, 2012, 9:43:46 AM11/26/12

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Hi all

I mentioned a while back we were re-doing our mobile site in Play 2 (scala + default templating), well we just launched...

http://m.guardian.co.uk (best on mobile devices)

There is a bit of a blogpost here (not really technical) http://m.guardian.co.uk/help/insideguardian/2012/nov/26/guardian-launches-new-mobile-site

Grant

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Guillaume Bort

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Nov 26, 2012, 5:18:46 PM11/26/12

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Thanks Grant; it's a really nice website!

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Eric Jain

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Nov 26, 2012, 9:02:22 PM11/26/12

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Neat! Are you using https://github.com/guardian/sbt-play-assethash?

Choon Kee

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Nov 26, 2012, 9:06:10 PM11/26/12

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Nice!!! :)

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James Roper

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Nov 27, 2012, 12:17:25 AM11/27/12

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This is great, the site loads very fast on my android.

Sean Brady

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Nov 27, 2012, 12:21:14 AM11/27/12

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Agree! @Grant -- anything you can share about your deployment architecture and scaling challenges/solutions would be awesome!

On Nov 26, 2012, at 9:17 PM, James Roper <jro...@gmail.com>

wrote:

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Grant Klopper

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Nov 27, 2012, 11:10:21 AM11/27/12

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Hi

Firstly thanks for all the positive feedback.

I should have mentioned our code is up on GitHub so feel free to take a look. https://github.com/guardian/frontend (also, yes, we wrote the asset hash)

The architecture is pretty simple....

The different types of things you see (such as an article or a video) are Play apps that runs on separate clusters (simple EC2 instances in auto scaling groups) and we route to these via an Nginx cluster (again EC2 autoscale group).

Scalability and speed are handled by some simple rules (not really specific to Play) ...

1. Everything is cached (behind Akamai), even live stuff (but just for a few seconds).

2. No request ever spawns more than one blocking IO request (mainly to our content API).

3. Keep Javascript and css as small as possible and do as much as possible after page load.

4. We do not expect total consistency (no complicated de-cache or launch rules).

Grant

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Alex Jarvis

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Nov 28, 2012, 11:33:31 AM11/28/12

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Thanks for posting this Grant, it looks awesome!

What were the reasons for splitting the different sections of the website into different apps? Was it to scale the load independently, modularise development or a mixture of both?