Bringing Symfony 2 to the cloud.. perhaps.

It’s been quite a while since I last posted a blog on here, so I figured I could write about my new side project to keep you guys busy. ;)

About 8 months ago I wrote about Symfony 2 because I wanted to use it for the Luister.us project (which has been put into the fridge for now, I’m simply to busy with paid work to develop such a large project on the side). Since then I’ve been trying out some stuff with Symfony 2 and I’ve been looking at other PHP frameworks too. All in all I must see, even though I’m still an unexperienced user, Symfony 2 is still my favorite framework from all the ones I’ve looked at (including Flow3, Lithium, Kohana, CakePHP and many others). I guess I’m a big fan of the concept behind the framework and their approach to things. And while the documentation of other PHP frameworks often appeared to be far from complete or was outdated, the Symfony 2 docs are actively maintained and very easy to understand.

Enough about Symfony 2 for now, let’s talk about getting your web application to the end-user, in other words, putting everything online. For a future project I was looking for tips and blogs about scaling a Symfony application and I came across a guide from Pagoda Box. They offer scalable web-hosting, as they call it themselves, and I figured, that’s what my client might need! You can try their service for free, so I decided to give it a try.

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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.

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Scrobbling while listening to the radio?

As some of you might know I’ve developed a few applications in the past that used the Last.fm API, for example Last 3FM and Copy Paste Scrobble.

A few weeks back I started working on a new webservice, called Luister.us, that makes it possible to scrobble the music you hear while listening to the radio. You might think it’s similar to Last 3FM and you’re right, it is similar. Actually it’s exactly the same, but a big difference is the fact that this webservice will work for way more radio stations. Also the software behind it is way more advanced than the messy PHP code I used with Last 3FM, but I’ll talk about the later.

I’m currently testing the back end of the service, where all the magic happens basically, and it seems to work pretty well. The software is recognizing plays from the following stations (to name a few):

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