Contents 1 What is Butaca 1.1 Description 1.2 Goals 1.3 Origin 2 How does it work? 2.1 In Fremantle 2.2 In MeeGo / Harmattan 2.3 Current status

What is Butaca

Description

Butaca is an application providing movie information
Butaca is an application which allows the user to access movie information -such as title, cast, trailers, overview...-, check movie showtimes and check whether a movie has extras after and during the credits.
In order to achieve that, it queries the movie information from The Movie Database, the movie showtimes from Google Movies and the extras information from What's After the Credits

Goals

Butaca was born with the following goals:

• Provide different information about a movie, such as title, cast, trailers, overview, budget, rating or ranking, among others.
• Tell whether a movie has extras after or during the credits, so you'll know if it's worth waiting in the cinema
• Check movie showtimes: where and when a movie is being played.
• Share it with others: tell that you're going to watch this or that movie (or that you already did), share a trailer, etc.
• Keep a list of your favorite movies

Origin

Project Butaca originated in Fremantle, being available in extras-devel. While some of the previous goals are completed (it's possible to retrieve information, check the extras and movie showtimes, as well as using a list of favorite movies), others arent: it's not possible to watch trailers or share with others.

How does it work?

In Fremantle

The version available in Fremantle was built on top of two components:

• A D-Bus based service, which retrieves the information from The Movie Database and What's After the Credits using LibSoup, parses it using Libxml and JSON-GLib, and makes it available on the bus
• A Hildon-based Python client, which accesses to the information on D-Bus and presents it to the user, and which also takes care of storing the favorite list of items

In MeeGo / Harmattan

The D-Bus service is already ported to Harmattan available at Gitorius. However, after starting to use QML's XML List models, it's still unclear if the D-Bus service will be needed. It seems that everything can be done on the client side.

• A series of XmlListModels are defined to represent XML responses from The Movie Database
• Delegates are designed in order to display the content from those XmlListModels in a fashionable way
• Page navigation is done using PageStacks to allow searching and browsing the content.
• Movie showtimes are shown using a WebView pointing to Google Movies

Current status

To benefit from the integrated bugtracker and wiki, project Butaca has been created at the Nokia Developer Projects website. You can check the current status there, as well as nice screenshots. You can also follow the development on

• Butaca category on my personal blog
• My twitter timeline
• Butaca project at gitorious