Let Maldòn rise again!
This post was originally posted at https://www.rymai.me/2016/10/01/let-maldon-rise-again/.
I have a project on my mind for some time now. The project is to rewrite the Maldòn application (maldon.io) –which was initially developed in PHP for an internal Dailymotion hackathon in 2 days– with a new Web stack I want to try.
What is Maldòn?
Maldòn is a website where you can “Watch your songs”, in other words, you can import your musical playlists from your favorite music services (Spotify, Deezer, Last.fm etc.), and get to watch their associated music video.
What is this new Web stack?
Without more suspense, the stack we will be using is as follow:
- Elixir & OTP
- The Phoenix framework
- A modern frontend framework such as VueJS or React (this is still to decide)
- GitLab as our code hosting and versioning, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Delivery solution
Why rewriting a working application?
The rewrite is mostly an excuse to explore Elixir & OTP, Phoenix and VueJS/React in a real-world project that’s already in production. That said, the application does not scale very well, for instance the playlists, songs and videos fetching is done synchronously, leading to very long page load time after you sign up and the application needs to import your playlists and fetch their associated videos. By leveraging Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix channels, the goal is to provide a much smoother user experience!
What is the plan?
The plan is to blog everything I do, from the start to the end, and to create a merge request for each blog post so that you can follow along:
- Create the project, host it on GitLab and setup automated testing
- Develop the backend, probably transforming it into an umbrella application
- Develop the frontend to offer a user-friendly experience using Phoenix channels and VueJS/React
- Deploy the application manually
- Automate the deployment of the application using GitLab
I will heavily rely on what I learned in the awesome Programming Phoenix book.
I don’t know yet how many posts I will do, but probably a lot. That will for sure be a very interesting adventure in which I will learn a lot, and I hope you will too!
Stay tuned for the first blog post in which I will create and setup the basis for this project.
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