The useless memoranda of Arno Moonen

Starting from scratch.. sort of..

I figured I write a short blog post about the progress I’m making on the Luister.us project a wrote about two weeks ago. Hope some of you find this information useful!

Not so long ago I wrote about the new Last.fm service I’m hoping to launch. A big, important part of the PHP code for the back- and front-end was already finished actually. I was waiting to get my MacBook back so I could give the front-end a nice design and fix the last things, so it could go live.

Unfortunately, as some of you might know, I’m still waiting for my MacBook Pro to get fixed, so I got bored. I decided to look into some PHP frameworks, since I wanted to use one on my next project. I had already done this a while back (I had a look at Kohana then, which looks promising) but I just wanted to see some more frameworks so I could compare them a bit.

This time I came across Symfony and more specifically Symfony2. I watched some videos, looked at a lot of code, read other peoples opinions and I must say I’m excited about it. Even though it’s still a release candidate and people strongly advise you not to use it in production, I figured I just had to use this. While reading about Symfony2 I got tons of ideas of how I could use this for Luister.us and finally I decided to start all over again with the development of that project.

So here I am; about a week later and finally starting on the new version of the Luister.us webservice (I’ve been working on some other projects for another company and we’re actually planning on doing a Symfony2-based project there too). Progress is rather slow, but hey, it’s all new to me. I never used to program in PHP like this, but somehow the way the Symfony2 developers built the framework and architecture makes sense to me. For those of you who didn’t know this; I’ve been programming a lot in Java and C# too in the past, so it’s not like I don’t have any experience with OOP. It’s just that I never really applied it in my PHP projects.

In the mean time I also got in touch with Last.fm regarding the API license I need (non-commercial / commercial). Still waiting for a final answer, but it looks like I’ll be using the MusicBrainz XML Webservice more than I was initially planning on.

Since I’ll be interacting with the Last.fm API and MusicBrainz API and I haven’t found any bundles / services / add-ons / whatever-you’d-like-to-call-them for Symfony2 yet that takes care of this, I decided that I’m going to try to develop these myself. If all goes well, these bundles will be available for free in the future.

Hopefully I’ll manage to rewrite the code in a few weeks time and learn how to use / implement the Symfony2 framework at the same time. I’ll keep you posted!