The application launcher for U-verse TV had many names over the years, most recently being called TV Interactive. The application launcher was designed to support the large number of apps (at times up to 40) on the platform. Many internal teams and third parties were developing apps with different deployment and retirement schedules. The application launcher needed to be updated live in production sometimes at least once a week.
The application was data driven and built in components. There is a single xml datasource with built in xslt transforms and scripts controlling all aspects of the application including the control of individual applications by city. The right hand section of the app is a template which can be switched out to give a different layout per section if necessary. This allows for updates to be made in the application purely by changing the datasource and making no code changes. As a core part of the service the application had requirements to load in a short amount of time. The application was hosted on an internal cloud service. Many optimizations were made in code and caching to ensure this application performed to the same standards as the rest of the embedded software.
I built, tested and managed the updates to the application over a number of years. It became one of the key differentiators in the service as it allowed us to deploy and cycle applications at a speed not met by any other competing TV service.
