Adriano Celentano is a very popular Italian singer, actor, director, and television showman. He'll launch a new highly debated show (called RockPolitik) on Italian public RAI TV tomorrow and today his new web site, www.clancelentano.it, has gone online. You can browse it in English, following the proper links in the home page.
The reason I'm blogging about this is that I was involved in building the web site. It is based on the same technology as used for this blog (the underlying Kylix applications are almost identical, even if the site is totally different). If you browse the WAI (accessible) portion you'll see XHTML mostly produced by transforming the undrelying XML data structure (some pages are static, though). If you use the Flash version, it is again powered by the same XML data, transformed into a more compact attributed-based version that is better suited for processing by Flash. If you browse the list of albums and their tracks, for example, this is powered by my code. When you hear songs or watch videos that's Macromedia streaming server in action.
OK, the involvement of the Delphi langauge in the site itself is minimal (configuration is based on XSD, XML, XSLT and so forth) but its role is relevant in keeping the servers efficient and providing fast response times. Moreover, Indy components are extensively used and do help. We have seen similar architectures based on Java and requiring much larger hardware to obtain the same results.
Have a look to the site and let me know what you think...