Blog Development
Flashback to MINIM!
Way back in 2017(!) I built a complex backend for The Royal College Of Music which interfaced with multiple mainframe computers based in Universities and Museums all over the world.
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- Written by
- Alex Tweedie
Many moons ago, in 2017(!), I built a complex backend for The Royal College Of Music which interfaced with multiple mainframe computers based in Universities and Museums. I was digging through my cloud storage and found a video of the import process which I thought would be interesting to share.
This was only the third project that I had used Laravel for and by far the biggest one. As of the time of writing, Laravel is on version 12, and I used at the time the brand new Laravel 5.3 for this project
I fell in love with the eloquent ORM, making complex database relationships so much easier to manage in terms of coding queries. In the video above, which I came across randomly while looking through my Google cloud storage at big items I might be able to delete to create more space, I am showing the custom import process and the resulting text, audio and video data resulting from the import.
I'm proud of the job I did on this, both in terms of the responsive frontend of the admin interface I built with Laravel datatables allowing instant listing access of over 22000 musical instruments, but the complexity of the import process. I had to write several versions of the import as different institutions were using slightly different interpretations of the LIDO XML standard to verbosely describe any type of ancience musical instrument in extreme detail.
The data expanded to hundreds of institutions worldwide including the world's most prominent Museums and Universities that kept these instruments, intricately detailing over 22,000 unique and precious examples, and can be explored at https://minim.ac.uk/