Planet Nectarius

I’ve been working on the next version of the scrobbling api at last.fm for ages now.
At one point we decided to abandon the tomcat container and rewrite it as a thrift server. That was actually rather easy and in the refactoring process we made things quite a bit better.

The last few months has mostly been integrating it with the existing web services and working around our web stack deployment schedule. That is, hooking up the thrift server to our php webservices framework. The amount of code in there is tiny, but it’s taken time because we have done very extensive testing and sometimes had to wait till the next release cycle to see the changes (we optimised the process by the end). So many wonderfully tedious unit tests and time consuming load tests (with graphs!). I even wrote some php unit tests myself. The load testing also managed to uncover an unknown obscure issue that’s been effecting the whole site subtly.

Anyway, I’m pretty pleased with the result. We’ve released next beta 2 now. See my forum post.
I’m fairly confident this will be the finalised api and we’ll announce it as such soon.