A few days ago, I found out about Dweet.io which is billed as “Ridiculously simple data sharing for the Internet of Things.”
The entire concept was pretty interesting to me. I liked the simplicity of it, and how it was so transient - made for machines to talk to machines. I also liked that if a message wasn’t picked up in 24 hours, then it clearly wasn’t important and that message disappeared.
I have also wanted try a web framework called Laravel for a little while. Laravel bills itself as “the PHP framework for web artisans” and looked like something I could work with. It has all the right and proper buzzwords and seemed capable at first glance. At nonfiction we have been using mostly Ruby for our app creation for the last few years - even though our CMS is written in PHP - I wanted to use a PHP framework that was more modern than our inhouse toolset.
So I decided to re-impliment Dweet.io in Laravel - and in a few hours - under 5 in total - I did.
Overall I’m pretty happy with the result and happy that I was able to bend Laravel to my will. I have started a few projects like this where I wasn’t able to actually launch - even though I spent more time than 5 hours - that’s frustrating.
The result is http://dweet-laravel.herokuapp.com/ and the code is available on Github.
It is mostly feature complete and on parity with the public documentation on Dweet.io. It provided a small project where I could get used to at least parts of the framework, and unlike some other tools, I was able to work through it fairly quickly and without too much hassle.
If you’re interseted in Dweet or Laravel, give it a spin.
If you’ve got a framework you want to try out, give this type of project a shot - it’s a small enough feature set that’s pretty easy to bite off and accomplish.