Amara Emerson

I've not done PHP in a long while, since my last hand coded site that was operating back in 2006/early 2007. While it was a worthwhile experience, and for my needs it worked well, I think I need to move onto a more web 2.0 style of web development.

I just used a term which no one really knows what it means. Marketing buzz-word? Definitely. Anyhow, the general gist is that a more sophisticated paradigm should be used (oops, another marketing buzzword) for future developments.

Drupal, which runs the site currently is excellent and I have no problem with it. This stuff will just be for my own benefit, getting to grips with using a more robust system. One of the concepts which is generally new to me is MVC, Model-View-Controller. I've heard of it, but never used it since all my code was application specific tying the data and GUI implementation together into one.

I've been developing an Amarok-like clone for the Windows platform over the past few months as part of a college project. Recently as the deadline nears I've been going on more and more bughunts and the applications now become usable by myself as a proper player.

The codebase is still very simplistic in comparison to the likes of Amarok and iTunes obviously, but it has a central playlist with drag and drop reordering as well as lyrics fetching support and a tree based display of the collection. While I'll probably make a major overhaul of the database backend and structure for now the single table approach will have to do.

New version of xorc out, nothing has changed really. Just a few string fixes and cleanup of code. It's been almost a year since I first wrote it. I'm working on some new things, so hasn't gotten much love. Download the new version (0.3.3) on the xorc page.

Well in my previous post I said I was going to use MySQL as the backend for my music player. I was going to use the ODBC features in .NET, but have decided for ease of installation's sake to use SQLite.

SQLite is a database engine which stores the whole database in a single file, and is accessed primarily with the SQLite C API. But, in true .NET fashion I found this, System.Data.SQLite. It's a .NET version of SQLite. An interesting thing to mention is that SQLite is released under the public domain, with no license. Anybody can use the source code for any purpose.

Using SQLite means that to use the application users won't have to install a large database like MySQL, all the DB functionality is included in a .NET assembly distributed with the program.