A webapp in Laravel (PHP) that uses the REST API of Spotify. Written for my bachelor class 'Web Programming'.
Cambio is a multi-user platform for managing playlists, which leverages the Search API to obtain information from the catalog of Spotify about millions of tracks. For each track, it displays the image of the album to which it belongs, the song title, the name of the album and the artists it belongs to.
The webapp was developed using:
- Laravel, framework PHP
- JavaScript
- Bootstrap (CSS)
- MySQL Database
- Spotify's REST API
using a Model-View-Controller architecture.
Spotify's Web APIs provide access to metadata on music, artists, and albums. Several endpoints are provided that are associated to the features offered. Spotify's Web APIs are based on the REST principles, meaning that each action is associated with the appropriate HTTP method appropriate.
The function used is the search function, whose endpoint is: https://api.spotify.com/v1/search, it is necessary to make requests through the GET method. Among the parameters of the request one must specify a token in the header.
The necessary token can be obtained by registering your application in Spotify's developer section which will lead eventually to the client_id and client_secret.
Since Spotify is based on OAuth 2.0, one has to request the token through the dedicated endpoint: https://accounts.spotify.com/api/token, specifying the parameter "grant_type" to "client_credential" and adding a header that has Base64("client_id:client_secret") as the value. The response is in JSON format and contains the token if the authentication was successful. successful, otherwise an error is returned. The token obtained allows a number of operations, from which are excluded those on the data of users, which instead require a different authorization.
The only parameters required, besides the token in the header, are q and type, which indicate the query to be searched and the type of the search.
Valid "types" are: album, artist, playlist, track.
The Cambio platform fixes the type=track parameter, so as to have an image returned in each case. The search returns a JSON, which contains an array of tracks. From each of these the title, album, image, and the artists.
In purple the web pages while in green there are the back-end components, which use the database and the external API.
