relaunch of mp3.de
for the cologne agency tigavision GmbH, handgestrickt is making the AJAX-functionalities for the relaunch of the german well-known music-platform mp3.de. todays topic was the common search-input functionality, to suggest possible values based upon some characters the user typed in. one interesting task was the "loose" or tolerant phonetic search for entries. this is done by the MySQL and PHP-function soundex. this function calculates some phonetic key for every word, that can be matched against nearly matching words. for performance we splitted the result of soundex into varchar and bigint pieces and stored them in the database with indexes. the result was a lightining fast phonetically tolerant suggestion algorithm.
as a developing enviroment we used a Windows 2000 with a XAMPP-installation. Apache, MySQL, PHP5 is installed in minutes. unbelievable! for versioning we use TortoiseSVN.
