The 2020 Next.js rewrite, now being merged into impress!
Matchu
d3b9f72e67
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 |
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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.