MusicBottle

From MusicBrainz Wiki
Revision as of 03:55, 31 December 2012 by Freso (talk | contribs) (More Bottle development links.)
Jump to navigationJump to search

MusicBottle (or "the bottle") is the temporary codename for a new project being discussed mostly between caller#6 and Freso. This here page will document design decisions etc.

Discussion will happen probably mostly on IRC in the room #musicbottle. Feel free to come and hang out. We will probably also utilise the mb-devel mailing list for getting feedback on some design decisions (e.g., input on how to implement caching).

porpoise.jpg

Purpoise, the Mission Statement

  1. Showcase the MusicBrainz data in a prettier way than what can reasonably be achieved on musicbrainz.org.
  2. Show what can be done using the data fetched from MusicBrainz' Web Service.

Background

(Write stuff.)

Design decisions/philosophy

  1. Don't hardcode any information. While it may be tempting to mark that Mozart is a composer in the code, we want the site to display the what can be retrieved using only MusicBrainz. Retrieving information from sources linked to from MB data is fine, but hardcoding such info is not.
  2. Use the URL scheme of musicbrainz.org as long as at makes sense. This should simplify a lot of things, and make inter-site URL mapping quite easy. So e.g. http://musicbottle.net/artist/3c25958a-2bff-4381-8eb4-7dbe84c3e75e will match https://musicbrainz.org/artist/3c25958a-2bff-4381-8eb4-7dbe84c3e75e

Implementation

As Freso likes writing Python and CallerNo6 wants to learn the language, this quickly became the language of the project. Flask was initially recommended by ianweller and subsequently endorsed by ruaok, so that is the framework we're currently looking into. We will most likely aim for getting the code running on an nginx server.

We're also going to need some kind of cache, to not hit MusicBrainz (or other sites) over and over again. We're looking into MongoDB and possibly other NoSQL databases for now.

The main codebase is GPL v2+ and any libraries developed to keep sane abstractions will be LGPL'd. (Any Flask-specific extensions will be BSD/MIT-style licensed.) The code is available on GitHub.

Libraries, APIs, etc.

Other pointers

Random ideas

How and what to pull in and how to present it?

Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, ... activity streams.

Images from fanart.tv

Proper name

The "Musicbottle" name is just a codename until we decide on a proper name. Several suggestions have been thrown back and forth. General themes are music and brains (for obvious reasons), bottles/flasks (due to using Flask), and Star Trek (because of MusicBrainz Picard and CallerNo6 being an old-time trekkie). Suggestions are welcome.

Inspiration

Mock-up pages

Other sites

Sub and related pages