The 2020 Next.js rewrite, now being merged into impress!
Matchu
2887d952de
Whew, setting up a cute GraphQL SSR system! I feel like it strikes a good balance of not having actually too many moving parts, though it's still a bit extensive for the problem we're solving 😅
Anyway, by doing SSR at _all_, we solve the problem where Next's "Automatic Static Optimization" was causing problems by setting the outfit state to the default at the start of the page load.
So I figured, why not try to SSR things _good_?
Now, when you navigate to the /outfits/new page, Next.js will go get the necessary GraphQL data to show the image before even putting the page into view. This makes the image show up all snappy-like! (when images.neopets.com is behaving :p)
We could do this with the stuff in the items panel too, but it's a tiny bit more annoying in the code right now, so I'm just gonna not worry about it and see how this performs in practice!
This change _doesn't_ include making the images actually show up before JS loads in, I assume because our JS code tries to validate that the images have loaded before fading them in on the page. Idk if we want to do something smarter there for the SSR case, to try to get them loading in faster!
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Dress to Impress 2020
This is a rewrite of the Neopets customization app, Dress to Impress!
It's a React app, built with create-react-app, running on Vercel, JAMstack-style.
The motivating goals of the rewrite are:
- Mobile friendly, to match Neopets's move to mobile.
- Simple modern tech, to be more maintainable over time and decrease hosting costs.
If you want to contribute, please reach out to Matchu! This repository is almost shareable, but the main limitation is that we currently run even our development server against the production database, and those credentials are private. But we can change that if there's interest!
Architecture sketch
First, there's the core app, in this repository.
- React app: Runs on Vercel's CDN. Code in
src/app. - API functions: Run on Vercel's Serverless Functions. Code in
apiandsrc/server.
Then, there's our various data storage components.
- MySQL database: Runs on our Linode VPS, colocated with the old app.
- Amazon S3: Stores PNGs of pet/item appearance layers, converted from the Neopets SWFs. (Once Neopets releases HTML5-compatible assets for all their items, we can hopefully remove this!)
Finally, there's our third-party integrations.
- Auth0: For authentication. Data imported from our old OpenNeo ID auth database.
- Honeycomb: For observability & performance insights on the backend.
- Discord: For logging Support users' actions to a private Discord server.
- Neopets: We load pet data from them! And plenty of assets!
Notable old components not currently included in Impress 2020:
- Elasticsearch: Used for lightning-fast item search queries. So far, we're finding the MySQL queries to be fast enough in practice. Might consider using some kind of fulltext query engine if that doesn't scale with more users!
- Resque: Used to schedule background tasks for modeling and outfit thumbnails.
- Outfit thumbnail generation: Used for outfit thumbnails in the app. I'm wondering if there's a way to get away with not doing this, like just rendering the layers... but I suppose if we want a good social share experience, then we'll probably want this. Maybe we can generate them on the fly as API requests, instead of adding a data storage component?
- Memcache: Used to cache common HTML and JSON snippets. Not yet needing anything similar in Impress 2020!
- The entire old Rails app! No references to it in here, aside from some temporary URL links to features that aren't implemented here yet.