The code behind the new SP-Studio

Lars Kliesing — Sun, 20 Dec 2020 15:39:52 +0000

For some months I’m working on a cool project. It’s a web app where users can design their own characters in a South Park style. It’s the new modern version of the SP-Studio.

The older version is already about 19 years old(!) and was running with Adobe Flash. Modern browsers stopped recommending using Flash already since many years, but technically still supported it. But at the end of 2020, Flash will be entirely shut down (R.I.P. ).

Honestly it’s been some years since I visited sp-studio.de the last time, but when I was younger, I was a big fan of it. That’s why it’s a big honor for me, to bring this cool project to a new life by developing this new modern version.

Not only doesn’t this new version depend on Flash anymore, it’s designed mobile-first and works on multiple platforms: smartphones, tables, laptops and desktops. It’s also a Progressive Web App (PWA for short). This means, you can visit it normally with your browser, but are also able to install it on your device, so it will act like an app.

To find out all other things that changed since the older version, please check out this post. On this post, I want to write about the code and the technology behind this new version.

Why React?

I would say I’m already very experienced by using the React library because I already use it for a while for different projects. Compared to them, SP-Studio is actually pretty simple and straightforward to code. For the project I don’t even need any other big libraries like React Router, since we don’t need different pages. I also don’t use complex state mangers like Redux, I just work with props and states to let the different components talk to each other.

The project folder is generated with create-react-app (or “CRA” for short) and the TypeScript template. TypeScript forces me to work less chaotically, that’s why I love it.

Working with the SVG assets

The most important task the app has to do, is to read the different assets the user should be able to add to its character. All assets are prepared by Janina as SVG files. And that’s another benefit from React, because it natively supports components in SVG format and can also manipulate its attributes with code.

The default body asset and its default color tones

This is how the SVG file of the default body asset looks like:

Unfortunately I can’t directly use it like this for the application. It has to be formatted in a JSX format, also it needs to be a real React Component with props, so the values like colors can be changed from outside. That’s why wrote a script, which converts it to this:

import React from "react"
import { AssetSvgProps } from "../../../shared/assets"

export const defaultColors = {
    "col1d": "#6486A6",
    "col1n": "#8FAFCD",
    "col1s": "#49657E"
}

function SkiSki001({ colors = defaultColors, onClick, outerTransform, transform }: AssetSvgProps) {
    return (
        
                
                
                
                
                    
                
            
            
            
            
        
    )
}

export default SkiSki001

But the script does do more than just to convert the asset to a React-friendly format. Actually this part is realized with the library @svgr/core.
My script extracts the primary color tones from the vector graphic and sets them as the default color options. These colors can be overwritten later by the user. The script does also do some more things to make it easier to work with the components from outside.

Workflow with GitHub and Vercel

Vercel deploys and hosts for each change pushed to GitHub

I host and manage all my code repositories on GitHub, so I also do this one. GitHub is awesome for collaborating, and it’s easy for Janina to upload new assets. Even though the productive version wouldn’t be hosted there, we also use Vercel to deploy and host states of the site for testing and debugging. Vercel works seamlessly together with GitHub and automatically deploys when I push new changes, so I can easily show them to Janina or to test them on different devices.

That’s it

for this article. If you would like to know more details about certain things or have any questions, let me know in the comments.

The final version of the app will be launched tomorrow as I write this, so check it out when it’s published: https://sp-studio.de/

The app will evolve with the time. We plan to publish a big update with more features early 2021.

If / else statement inside of React Component’s Render method

Lars Kliesing — Fri, 04 Aug 2017 09:50:11 +0000

Sometimes (well, actually pretty often) you have to use conditional statements inside of React Component’s Render methods.

You could do it like this:

import React from "react";

class MyComponent extends React.Component {
    render() {
        return (
            
                {"LGK" == "awesome" ?
                    LGK is awesome!
                : 
                    LGK is not awesome :C
                }
            
        );
    }
}

This works without any problem. But you always have to set the else part. But in many situations you only need the “if part”.
In this case, this way is much nicer:

import React from "react";

class MyComponent extends React.Component {
    render() {
        return (
            
                {"LGK" == "awesome" &&
                    LGK is awesome!
                }
            
        );
    }
}

React – LGK Blog