This document discusses building a single page application for the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) website using Sitecore and Backbone.js. It aimed to provide a more integrated application experience for users while maintaining Sitecore functionality like personalization and caching. Key challenges addressed were rendering pages server-side in Sitecore while using a client-side framework, and supporting older browsers. SignalR was used to enable real-time score and news updates. A Live Blog module was also created using this approach.

1. Organized by the Community, for the Community.
SINGLE PAGE APPLICATION
WITH REALTIME UPDATES
IN SITECORE
Richard Seal

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OVERVIEW
• Introductions…
• Who are ATP?
• Why a Single Page Application?
• What were the challenges?
• How we did it?
• RealTime Updates – Scoring & News Articles
• LiveBlog Market Place Module

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WHO ARETHE ATP
• The Association ofTennis Professionals
– Governing body of men’s professional tennis.
– Player ranking & tournaments
– ATPWorldTour finals – end of year tournament
• Some stats:
– Ave 9-10 Million visits per month
– Ave 30 -40 Million page hits
– 20 content editors, worldwide
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WHY A SINGLE PAGE APPLICATION?
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• Client Driven
• Wanted a “USAToday” feel to the site
• More like an integrated application and not a bunch
of disparate web pages.
• Sports Based
– Users should be less than a click away from live scores at
all times
– 2-3 clicks away from stats too!
• Bandwidth benefits
– User does not have to download the “scaffolding” of the
page every time.
WHY A SINGLE PAGE APPLICATION?
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WHAT CHALLENGES?
• Standard SPA
– Server Side: API Framework to pull data. No presentation
– Client Site: JavaScript application/framework to get the
data and present it.
• Angular, Backbone, Ember etc…
• We could do that in Sitecore… But:
– No page editing
– No personalization
– No caching on renderings
– Have to use ItemWebApi or build full custom Api to get
data.
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CHALLENGES CONT…?
• Other cons:
– Page rendering speed. Complex designs on older
machines, mobile devices == Bad user experience.
– Not great for SEO without a custom solution (at the time
of building)
– Client needed to support older versions of IE that did not
support push state. So needed to be able to fall back to a
“classic” style website in those situations
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HOW WE DID IT!
• Don’t re-invent the wheel.
– Backbone was our choice
• Light weight
• Simple to use
• Great community support
• Render the Html server side
– Standard Sitecore MVC Renderings
– Personalization, Datasources
– Sitecore rendering cache
– Can use Sitecore Field Renderers so the Page Editor still
works
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BACKBONE.JS
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Http Request Router
ViewDOM
Collection
/Models
Data
Source
Sitecore
Presentation

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BACKBONE SETUP
• Each page needs 2 views
– Standard, all headers and footers etc…
– Backbone/Ajax, just the content that changes from page
to page
• Setup new Device “Ajax”
– Simple query string
– Empty layout for ajax presentation with a single
placeholder
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?ajax=true

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BACKBONE SETUP CONT…
• Simple catch all route in backbone
– Catches all requests
– Can call xDB/Google analytics or other package here
– Loads default Sitecore view and tells it to render
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BACKBONE SETUP CONT…
• Main application view
– Kicks off page transition animations
– Calls render on the Sitecore view
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BACKBONE SETUP CONT…
• SitecoreView
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• Builds the url from the request and appends ajax=true
• Keeps any existing query string parameters
• Aborts any previous Ajax request
• Kicks off a new Ajax request for the page
• Calls the method to complete page transition animations

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SIMPLIFYINGTHE PRESENTATION
• Each page requires 2 sets of presentation
– Default Device
– Ajax Device
• Don’t want to force editors to build pages twice
• NewTemplate
– Add to the Device template inheritance:
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SIMPLIFYINGTHE PRESENTATION
• Set the Ajax Device to a Presentation Device.
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SIMPLIFYINGTHE PRESENTATION
• Set the Ajax Device to a Presentation Device.
• New pipeline processor:
– PerformRenderingForSinglePageApplication
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SIGNALR –REALTIME SCORES & NEWS
UPDATES
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Header/Menu
Scores/
News
Footer
Handled by BackboneView

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SIGNALR –REALTIME SCORES & NEWS
UPDATES
• SignalR to keep News & Scores updated
• Separate SignalR application
– Scale out / host in the Cloud (Azure)
• Scores update service
– Aggregates scores data with Sitecore data
– Pushes score updates through the SignalR application
• News Publish Pipeline
– Pushes new articles through SignalR based on the last
article published
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Player,Tournament & Scores Data
Sitecore DB
Live Scores
Update Service
Web Application
SignalR
Application
End User
Historical Scores
Service
Publish Pipeline

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NEWS PUBLISH PIPELINE
• The latest article published gets stored in an SQL
Table
• On publish, if the item is a news article, we check
the date against the last one published
• If its newer, it is queued for broadcast via the
SignalR application
• Each time an article is broadcast, the last article Id
gets updated in the table.
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NEWS PUBLISH PIPELINE
• On publish:end, the queue is then passed to the
SignalR application to broadcast out to all
subscribers
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SITECORE LIVE BLOG MODULE
• Out of this came the Live Blog module
• The blog consists of a Live Blog data template
– Datasource for the main blog
– Each entry is a Sitecore Item
• Can use as a Datasource if you wanted to “quote” the blog
elsewhere on the site
• A custom SPEAK editor for adding entries and
viewing existing entries
• A new Controller rendering for displaying the Blog
– Options for using require.js or other way of including the
JavaScript, or the rendering will include the files needed.
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SITECORE LIVE BLOG MODULE
• SignalR runs in the Sitecore Application Pool
– Pipelines to get it running:
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SITECORE LIVE BLOG MODULE
• SPEAK Editor
– Slack style commands
– Can easily add new commands by implementing
ILiveBlogCommand
– Commands defined in Sitecore
• ShipsWith
– Markdown: default command.
– Twitter: Embeds and tweet
– More coming!
– Surprise one for Slack members….
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LIVE BLOG
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Live Blog Editor
HUB
Command Parser
MD Tweet Other
Live Blog Rendering
Sitecore

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