An interesting part about BBC News's tech stack, which was touched on in another comment here, is that we didn't have the budget to serve dynamic pages and so e

An interesting part about BBC News's tech stack, which was touched on in another comment here, is that we didn't have the budget to serve dynamic pages and so everything SPG'd (statically page generated) as we called it so it could be served statically from the production web servers. It meant an incredibly novel use of Apple WebObjects - which was set up to render all of the versions of the story (flavours, I think we called them) via the WOA and then FTP them to production. We used this system to produce not only web versions but content for interactive TV output and I believe even Ceefax at one point. Another curious fact now: most of the BBC News website was coded in Objective C in the early 2000's, to much chagrin as it meant us developers having to learn this 'dead' language when really we wanted to use the Java version of WebObjects instead. Many of the devs went on to have leading roles in the UK iPhone development industry when apps were enabled for iPhone given the amount of experienced we all unknowingly had received in what suddenly became a much-sought after language.