Moped: a web client for the Mopidy music server

with the goal to make it a music server for our living room that can be operated from a phone, tablet or PC.

There are several audio software solutions for the PI and one of these, Mopidy, promised to do exactly what I wanted. It’s a server that plays audio and it can be configured with a lot of backend and frontend options. Currently I use it to play Spotify music and radio streams.

The only issue I had was that none of the available HTTP clients worked exactly the way I’d like. A quick peek in the source code of one of the clients revealed that it wasn’t really complex at all, so why not build a new client?

This proved to be an ideal situation to experiment with client side JavaScript frameworks. Mopidy comes with a nice Web Sockets interface and a JavaScript library that handles all communication, so I could purely focus on the client itself.

For a first version, I picked the Durandal framework because it appears to have quite some traction amongst .NET developers and I was just curious to see if it fits my development style. Also, Bootstrap 3 is being used because it has excellent support for responsive web apps.

A few weeks later and the first version is now on GitHub. I’ve planned to also build an Angular version because that’s my other weapon of choice nowadays and I think it makes up for a nice comparison.