A quick Omnigraffle import later, and I get useful diagrams like this fragment from the BBC Programme Catalogue codebase:

Here’s the code, ready for running from the top of any Rails project (ymmv, etc):

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require "config/environment"
Dir.glob("app/models/*rb") { |f|
require f
}
puts "digraph x {"
Dir.glob("app/models/*rb") { |f|
f.match(/\/([a-z_]+).rb/)
classname = $1.camelize
klass = Kernel.const_get classname
if klass.superclass == ActiveRecord::Base
puts classname
klass.reflect_on_all_associations.each { |a|
puts classname + " -> " + a.name.to_s.camelize.singularize + " [label="+a.macro.to_s+"]"
}
end
}
puts "}"

This afternoon I flipped the switch on the BBC Programme Catalogue and let everyone in. Stop reading this now and get in there.

I’m going to have a fun afternoon monitoring the server for load, but I know that lots of people are going to have a great deal more fun looking through the catalogue. The depth and quality of this unique library of information is quite stunning. It gets better every day, as it receives nightly updates from the master database inside the BBC. I was particularly pleased to discover that even my dad has a listing: he appeared on the local news as a council spokesman during the UK BSE crisis. As one of our early-access guinea pigs said, “this is as addictive as Google Earth for anyone interested in UK television and radio.”

If you’re interested in the technical details behind the site, I’ll be speaking at the RailsConf and XTech conferences later this year about how Ruby on Rails made this one of the smoothest software development projects I’ve ever worked on. I doff my cap to my co-conspirators: Tom Loosemore, Julie Rowbotham, Ben Hammersley, Adam Lee, and the wonderful librarians and techies who toil ceaselessly in the BBC’s archive.

Let me know what you think.

I had a great blessing from the demo gods. Simon Willison had borrowed my laptop for his talk. I was just about to demonstrate a search I’d pre-planned, but Firefox autocompleted my typing with ‘appleseed’, a term Simon had used to demonstrate local band search on lawrence.com. I took a deep breath and just hit ‘search’. The BBC archivists didn’t let me down – we found “A SERVICE FOR SCHOOLS, JOHNNY APPLESEED SUMMER 1981″ that was broadcast nearly 25 years ago on Radio 4. I went on from there to show what else had been archived from that day in 1981, demonstrate other searches and show off the full FOAF and RSS feeds for every item.

For completeness, I’ve posted the slides, which are done in S5 as usual. However, I’ve been reading Presentation Zen recently and they don’t really stand up by themselves. I’ve really gone off bullet points, and I find that if I use them then I read off my slides rather than talking to the audience. Oh, and I only tested the CSS on Firefox/Mac. They did look quite pretty on the night, I reckon.

It outlines one approach that I’ve been developing for the API in the BBC programme catalogue. One of the things I like a great deal about Rails is its URL routing and dispatch mechanism. Creating mappings from URLs to model instances makes a resource-oriented style feel very natural, which sits very well with REST.

Isn’t this a wonderfully literal interpretation of the article’s title?

“The BBC plans to open up its archive to make a treasure trove of material available to everyone.” – BBC Press Release, August 2003

Ever wondered what’s in that archive? Who looks after it? It turns out there’s a huge database that’s been carefully tended by a gang of crack BBC librarians for decades. Nearly a million programmes are catalogued, with descriptions, contributor details and annotations drawn from a wonderfully detailed controlled vocabulary.

I’m the lucky developer who gets to turn this hidden treasure into a public website. No programme downloads yet, but a massive searchable programme catalogue.

In the early part of next year, you can look forward to a public beta with extensive programme details and broadcast histories. There are “On This Day” schedules that go back to 1933. It’s got full contributor histories, and Really Good Search. I can’t begin to describe the depth of this dataset – it had an entry for the one time in the 1990s when my dad was on local TV news as a spokesman for Oxfordshire County Council. The cataloguers have worked hard on this stuff for years, and it deserves a wide audience.

Here are some early screenshots: searching for John Peel; John Peel’s contributor page. The design’s not finished yet, but they give you a flavour of the data.

Oh yes, there’s also plenty of web 2.0 goodness: Ajax, feeds for everything, tags, full read-only REST API including FOAF for all contributors, and it’s all run with Ruby on Rails. Yes, the BBC have allowed me (after some persuasion) to rapidly prototype and deploy this 7,000,000-row database-backed site in everyone’s new favourite web framework. This first version is really just a prototype; wisely, the BBC have decided to get it out there quick and see the public reaction.

We’ve got Ben Hammersley on board working on layout, CSS and feed design. Murray Walker is our BBC developer on the inside. This is the most fun I’ve had on a project for a long time. If you want to hear more about it, come and see me talk on Rails at the London Web Frameworks Night in November. If you’ve got ideas on how you’d want to track down an obscure sci-fi drama from the 80s or a radio play from 1962, drop me a mail.