[su_heading size=”15″ align=”left” margin=”10″]In the two years ClubLantic existed, the group produced an impressive portfolio of club and house tracks at a pretty fast pace. After all, the group had about five active composers, releasing over 60+ songs. Storing and retrieving records wasn’t the easiest job in the world then, while listeners around the world wanted to find and filter specific information.[/su_heading]
Dedicated fans wanted a quick overview of their favorite composer, zealots with a specific taste wanted to see songs in their genre, while virtually everbody loved to get a list with the last five releases. Today, this is easily done with e.g., SQL, XML or PHP. At that time, well – there was just basically HTML and JavaScript, but the self-acclaimed webmaster loved challenges and DataCrawler was born.
DataCrawler added one song per line (row) into a plain, but structured text file: “the database”. Each column was seperated by a | pipe with a title, artist, filename, style, release date and duration column. Group members added their release via a form, only the file upload to Skynet was a seperate action.
All information on the website instantly and automagically refreshed. The only server-side handling was writing one single line to a .txt file, while all the queries and filtering were processed on the client.
Man, this was practically AJAX in the Web 0.96 timeframe 😉
Other groups, like Destiny Music, and organizations showed interest in this state-of-the-art technology (uh huh). Surely, these methods are way outdated, while it’s fun to look back at the ’90s coding creativity.