Music Streaming as a Microservice

Motivation

As part of our 3rd semester studying Software Engineering, we were tasked with developing a music streaming platform based on a micro-service architecture. The class was separated into different teams, each responsible for developing their own micro-service.

My team was assigned to handle Portability - figuring out a way to port the software to different platforms.

The Challenge

We chose to primarily focus on smartphone platforms after finding research indicating that 99% of all mobile users have either iOS or Android operating systems. Given our limited time and being new to mobile development, we decided to use a cross-platform development approach rather than developing two separate native applications.

Technology Stack

We implemented the MERN stack (or rather MERNN in this case):

MongoDB: Database that stores data in JSON format, aligning with what other teams were using
Express.js: Web framework for our backend API
React Native: Cross-platform mobile development framework
Node.js: JavaScript runtime for the backend

Features

User Authentication: Secure login and account management
Music Library: Browse and organize music collection
Playlist Creation: Create, edit, and manage playlists
Media Player: Full-featured music player with background playback
Artist & Album Pages: Browse music by artist and album
Search Functionality: Find songs, artists, and albums
Lock Screen Controls: Media controls accessible from the lock screen

Deployment

To host the API, we used:

A Kubernetes cluster assigned to our team (maintained by another group)
A free Heroku server for rapid prototyping

Reflection

The project was a great success, and we had a lot of fun developing an app from the ground up. However, we of course didn’t reach all our goals and there was still room for improvement.

For instance, the media player implementation had limitations - it required a selected song and an array of songs to be received as props to the component, making it impossible to click the miniaturized track player to access the full-screen version.

In the future, a solution would be to use a state manager like Redux, MobX, or React’s Context API to make the list of songs and the selected song globally available to all components, similar to what we did with our login system.