Melty Colors Dev Diary - Part 2

Good news, I’m progressing pretty fast ! This won’t be a long post but here’s what I have, and what I learned so far

Current Progress and what’s ahead

I have an uninteractive version of the frontend mostly completed. I need to adjust a couple pages (submission and individual color viewer) and add a whole lot of validation, error handling, and some interactivity. For example while I don’t care if the UI looks incredible, I want a smooth UX especially for the image upload: I want to support putting a direct link, an image file and also a copy pasted image. Right now I only have the image file part down.

On the frontend side, I also need to figure out how to package and build the whole thing. While Javalin can serve static files, I believe it will be easier to use nginx (especially for HTTPS stuff). For the build part, I need to integrate the tailwind build process so I don’t ship a 3mb CSS file.

On the backend side, I have a lot of work to do database wise. I haven’t figured out my target database, and I still haven’t used JDBI.

What I learned so far

• I already knew this a long time ago, but damn Intellij IDEA is nice to use. I last used it a long time ago (I use Eclipse at work for reasons) so I forgot about how smooth it all is.
• Javalin is very comfortable to use, and while I’m not sure about the way my project is set up, the code I have is pretty clean and easy to understand. The only thing i’d like is hot reloading of both the java code and the frontend (live reloading for the frontend actually, as the templates updates themselves automatically), but I guess you can’t have it all (and it all starts up pretty fast anyway). The jte template engine is also proving itself very capable for my needs.
• TailwindCSS is still awesome to use.
• Coding is very fun when you can iterate quickly.

That’s it for today, stay tuned for more melty colors news !