Web Species blog

Couple months ago we started working on a very exciting project - building data access API for world’s largest cultural event, the Edinburgh Festival. It was a very exciting journey and here I’m sharing how we built it and what’s the stack used. The goal of this is to show how we solved specific problems and how you might apply it for your applications.

More and more projects are exposing their functionality via REST APIs. We think APIs are awesome and it’s great what they’ve done for the web overall, but we also see a lot of bad APIs examples, like Twitter API. It might be the case that if you don’t have the right tools, it becomes hard to implement them correctly and quick. Lately we have been working on a couple APIs and I decided to share our experiences and why we went with Python in the end.

I used to use Zend Framework extensively and still believe it’s the best framework for anything what doesn’t support PHP 5.3. However a couple months ago I started using Symfony2 for internal tools at Web Species and have stayed there since. It has its problems and flaws, but let me give you some thoughts why I think it’s the framework which is going to go big. Very big.

Recently I needed to process a huge array of data and because of PHP’s somewhat inefficient variables and especially arrays that was resulting in “out of memory” errors. However, I couldn’t use any other tools than PHP so was forced to come up with a solution implementation in it. Here is how I solved it using principles from functional languages.

I have talked about this before, but JavaScript should not dictate content or website structure. It should only improve the UI, but even with JavaScript disabled website should work. Using the new HTML5 History API allows to do that one step further - making dynamic websites behave like normal ones.