Let's Make A DnD Character: Part 6

Apollo and Hooks

The GraphQL API isn’t very cool without actually seeing the data in action, so it’s time to implement the client. In the same spirit of my Part 5 post where I just overloaded my Java app to run both a REST and GraphQL api, I’m going to overload my client to support both. I have written a bunch of business logic around rendering this stuff, so I don’t want to have to rebuild all of that. [Read More]

Let's Make A DnD Character: Part 5

GraphQL in Java

Time to play around with the first bit of new tech: GraphQL. Since I have all of the character creator logic already written in my Spring Boot Java app, I figured I will just expand on that and see how hard it would be to migrate a REST API to a GraphQL one. The first step for all of my API work is the spec. GraphQL Spec We already made a swagger spec in Part 1, so most of the work is already done here. [Read More]
dnd  graphql  java 

Let's Make A DnD Character: Part 4

Playing Around With Istio

When I originally set out on the DnD character creator, my goal was to make a bunch of implementations of the same API using different flavors of JVM languages: Java, Kotlin, and Scala. However, learning new languages isn’t as fun unless I’m solving new problems with them. If I’m just implementing the same thing over and over again but with different languages, the actual language features and the pros and cons of the language becomes hazy. [Read More]

Let's Make A DnD Character: Part 3

Make it Pretty

Now it’s time for my achilles heel: making things look nice. CSS is the bane of my existence. I hate it every time I use it, and the number of 2px bumps I have to do until everything magically lines up makes me want to die. Granted I have not used flex box and the new grid display, so I may have an unfair view of CSS. It is a necessary evil, though, because I really want to see my sprite sheet in action. [Read More]

Let's Make A DnD Character: Part 2

Turns Out Pretty Hard

I found an awesome sprite sheet collection that included a bunch of stuff I could use for generating some animated sprites for my generated DnD character I made in Part 1. My swagger spec shows that this endpoint will take in a CharacterInfo, and based on those choices I can walk the sprite sheet folder and pick the appropriate body, weapons, and armor. Now the tricky part is how to easily define which images to select given some condition in the provided CharacterInfo. [Read More]