NetTuts.com has kicked off a new tutorial series today about building a dating application with a combination of Laravel, MongoDB and the Sinch service allowing for messaging between users. The Sinch service has several features including voice/messaging/SMS communication methods and device verification.

In this tutorial, we're going to create a dating application for iOS similar to Tinder. For voice and messaging, we will leverage the Sinch platform, making use of its powerful SDK. In the first part, we will focus on the development of a RESTful API to store and retrieve user information. In the second part, the iOS client will hook into this API to find nearby users based on the user's current location. We will use Laravel 5.0 for the RESTful service and will be covering basic concepts, such as routes and controllers. We are also going to define custom models to support MongoDB integration in an ActiveRecord-like manner.

This first part of the series is mostly about just getting things set up so they walk you through:

• Basic setup of the Laravel application
• Creation of the Base model (for MongoDB connection)
• Creating helper methods
• Building out CRUD functionality for the database layer
• Making a User model
• Creating the BaseController class
• Making a SessionController class (and working with sessions)
• Building a UserController

They end this part of the series by hooking all of this functionality together with some simple RESTful routing for GET, POST, PUT and DELETE request handling for the various endpoints.