Hello netidee community.

Over the christmas holidays we had some time to kickstart our new prototype and we are really happy with our progress so far.

Early in the project we decided to throw our previous prototype out of the window (the one which is currently online at http://out-of-tune.org). The main reason for that was that the graph drawing library is deprecated, which means that there will be no more updates nor support from the developers. Therefore we had to find a new library. The requirements were that it is capable of all the stuff the previous one (linkurios.js) was. We also wanted to achieve a performance boost (if it is somehow possible).

Another big reason was that the quality of code was very poor, due to lack of experience, when we started this project in 2017. Furthermore we wanted to get rid of the JQuery dependency, because it is no longer state of the art. Instead, we now use Vue JS.

New vs Old

Currently the new prototype is nearly capable of doing the exact same things the old one was. We also gained a huge boost in performance, because the new library called ngraph enabled the use of WebGL technology, which is way faster than the previously used SVG rendering. We are glad that we have found this library. It is a little bit more complicated to work with, because of the lack of a good documentation, but there are a lot of examples and forum discussions available online.

When we had the first things up and running we wanted to stress-test the new library. We had it render our whole test data-set, which consists of approximately 200.000 artists and 1.400 genres. It took a while to generate the layout for the graph but the end-result is amazing.

The next steps are implementing old and new front-end features while simultaneously looking for new data-sources and also analyzing if we might have to switch to a different database. Currently we use Neo4J but the database gets to its limits when we try to add heaps of new data.

The out of tune team wishes you all a happy new year!

Stay tuned!