So I finally started looking into the race condition that makes item previews sometimes fail to load, and as expected, it was that we were trying to load the movie before CreateJS had necessarily loaded. Usually the timing worked out, esp after a reload, but not under certain circumstances!
Anyway, I've been wanting for a while to just bundle them instead. That'll help us more eagerly load them when we need them, and not depend on external CDNs, and remove a bunch of loading state!
So yeah, I had to learn how the `easeljs` and `tweenjs` NPM packages did their bundling, and how to use `imports-loader` to let them just register straight onto `window`! But we got there and it's pretty nice tbh!
Meta tags are a bit tricky in apps built with `create-react-app`! While some bots like Google are able to render the full page when crawling, not all bots are. Most will just see the empty-ish index.html that would normally load up the application.
But we want outfit sharing to work! And be cool! And use our new outfit thumbnails!
In this change, we add a new server-side rendering API route to handle `/outfits/:id`.
It's very weak server-side rendering: it just loads index.html, and makes a few small tweaks inside the `<head>` tag. But it should be enough for sharing to work in clients that support the basics of Open Graph, which I think most major providers respect! (I know Twitter has their own tags, but it also respects the basics of OG, so let's see whether there's anything we end up _wanting_ to tweak or not!)
I've got it in my IDE too, but I want more safeguards lol, I'm tired of goofing up the pushes :p
I don't allow warnings here, but still have them as warnings not errors; because I don't want them to block build, but I _do_ want them to block commit.
The layer preloader already takes advantage of, and primes, the HTTP cache.
But we still do duplicate work, on every OutfitPreview render, to re-execute movie clip libraries, and create a movie clip to test for animations. The former is nontrivial cost, and the latter is often large cost. This can make even basic outfit changes slow, when there's no change to the movie clip layers and the player is paused!
Here, we add an LRU cache for movie clip libraries, and for the question of "is it animated?". This should speed up a number of places where we would reload the movie (including between toggling the item), and various changes that were triggering full movie clip rebuilds unnecessarily.
We _aren't_ solving here for the fact that toggling an animated item requires rebuilding the movie clip, which could conceivably be cached—but with some state management trickiness, because ideally it should be a separate clip for each context where it's being shown. Imo not yet worth the effort! (esp because I think users understand that toggling an animated item can be slow, whereas this was affecting _other_ actions way too much)
I already had a script for this lying around, and adapted it a tiny bit to the repository!
Part of me thought about building it in as a support tool. I might've if:
- this CLI didn't already exist
- we already had tighter permissioning, this is pretty high stakes!!
I have this in the scripts, but the dev command is the big deal: it saves me ~2sec locally per GraphQL request :3
But the dev command requires an upstream change, I have a local fork working with it, but I'm gonna try to get a PR upstream!
Oops, we had a trailing comma, I feel like this might be why some tools seemed to respect these settings and other tools didn't!
This change seems to enable us to remove our weird hacks that made `vercel dev` run…
It's my first time using it, but it feels great already, I'm excited!
Getting it set up in WSL OpenSUSE was a bit tricky, but we got there! Had to install a lot of deps, a font package, and add some basic config to ~/.bashrc.
This guide gave us most of it, but we had to do a couple other little things, too! None of them were too nasty though, just some Googling and trying things. https://nickymeuleman.netlify.app/blog/gui-on-wsl2-cypress
Gosh, I'm really down this rabbit hole, huh? :p Anyway, turns out the `vercel dev` command contains a _fork_ of ts-node that doesn't respect the `ts-node` override key in `tsconfig.json`. But it does respect the env var!
So I've now set up `yarn start` to invoke `vercel dev` with the new env, which in turn invokes `yarn dev` to start the create-react-app dev server. Whew! (Probably a better dev experience tbh.)
`yarn build` was crashing on my `build-cached-data` script, because we were trying to run the Typescript file uncompiled!
Now, we run it with `ts-node`, which transparently compiles Typescript files before execution. Phew!
`react-scripts build` made some automated changes to `tsconfig.json` for compatibility with `create-react-app`, and I also added a `ts-node` section to override one of them so we can compile to CommonJS for `ts-node` script execution!
Oh yay, I'm pleased with this! I hope it works out well!
stale-while-revalidate is an HTTP caching feature that gives us the ability to still serve relatively static content like item pages ASAP, while also making sure users generally see updates quickly.
The trick is that we declare a period of time where, you can still serve the data from the cache, but you should _then_ go re-fetch the latest data in the background for next time. This works on end users and on the CDN!
I've scanned the basic wardrobe and homepage stuff and brought them up-to-date, and gave particular attention to the item page, which I hope can be very very snappy now! :3
Note to self: Vercel says we can manually clear out a stale-while-revalidate resource by requesting it with `Pragma: no-cache`. I'm not sure it will listen to us for _fresh_ resources, though, so I'm not sure we can actually use that to flush things out in the way I had been hoping until writing this sentence lol :p
So, I ran into some weird Apollo behavior, and was hoping it was a bug that the upgrade would fix. It didn't! But it seems to still run the site fine, so, okay, new version, neat!
Idly wondering if it's time to start adding some basic e2e tests, to validate updates like this...
My main reason for adding this now is that I'm getting some scattered reports of things not displaying correctly, and I want to start gathering some browser data on that...
I recently confirmed that animations work on iOS (at least one did!), which was going to be my guess of what was breaking...
I took out virtualization for now too, I wanna see how this non-Chakra UI version, with fewer nodes and no tooltips etc, performs on large lists in production.
Looks like there was some kind of runtime conflict when running @emotion/css and @emotion/react at the same time in this app? Some styles would just get clobbered, making things look all weird.
Here, I've removed our @emotion/css dependency, and use the `<ClassNames>` utility element from `@emotion/react` instead. I'm not thrilled about the solution, but it seems okay for now...
...one other thing I tried was passing a `css` prop to Chakra elements, which seemed to work, but to clobber the element's own Emotion-based styles. I assumed that the Babel macro wouldn't help us, and wouldn't convert css props to className props for non-HTML elements... but I suppose I'm not sure!
Anyway, I don't love this syntax... but I'm happy for the site to be working again. I wonder if we can find something better.
Another longshot attempt to fix the prod-only emotion bug for free :p
This should be a very easy upgrade, bc I don't think we depend on the minor stuff that had breaking changes.
I'm naively hoping that this fixes the issue with Emotion/Chakra styles that only shows up on prod…
We've had an issue with prod-only bugs before, and it was due to a compiler bug re comments in JSX. I'm wondering if maybe one of our deps now has the same or a similar bug? and if maybe upgrading react-scripts will upgrade webpack, which might fix it?
It's a bit of a longshot, but it's a good upgrade to do anyway, so let's see if we get lucky!
Also, react-scripts 4 has Fast Refresh built in, so we can remove our overrides that added it!
The AMFPHP gateway's json.php endpoint has always had a problem parsing pets whose names start with digits… I've dug into it before, and checked again today, and there really is just no way around it: d584b58e95/core/json/app/Actions.php (L43)
And there aren't any reliable AMFPHP Node libraries out there to make the actual native AMF call.
Buuuut! In today's investigation, I noticed the xmlrpc.php endpoint for the first time. And, wouldn't you know it, there's //great// reliability for something as enterprise-standard as that!
So here, I've switched over to using an xmlrpc client library, which simplifies our calling code //and// makes number pets work correctly 😁 I wouldn't have done it just for the simplification, I think bringing in a library is net more complexity… but getting this finally right is a big relief.
