World icons being stored statically instead of using API to get icons

[Inumedia]

This could lead to confusion from other developers who look toward us for static links to assets.

[corsair]

Currently, our pixelPerfect script only supports URLs (recently updated to support remote), but would not support the encoded server icon images. This is why storing the icons statically (local) was used and maintained from the legacy site.

Needs Discussion:
Should we create a back-end function to request then save these icons locally, then request them from there?

[Inumedia]

You mean something like this? http://maplestory.io/api/server/khaini/icon

[corsair]

@Inumedia Still needs a response to the discussion piece. It's not efficient for the client to make six requests for the world's icons on every page-load.

[Acen]

Not wanting to try a Service Worker to fetch/cache this into Cache Storage?

[corsair]

@Acen We definitely can go that route.

[Acen]

I'd be keen to start building it out.
It would be sweet to be able to prefetch->cache the items coming out of the API too until it's updated then automatically notify the user of an update.

But this is getting off topic. I'll create a fork tonight.

[corsair]

I wanted to go that route initially @Acen, requesting for new items on the server-side, then feeding them to the client like we did prior with the legacy Maple.fm, however @Inumedia wanted to focus more on handling everything on the client-side and not depending on Laravel's backend as much.

If we were to go the route of making all requests prefetched in the background and than cached (with it expiring every 30 seconds to a minute), we could handle world icons, items, and even the item-list this way (item list would be cached for days though, with a manual override in case we update the database).

[Acen]

Service Workers are done on the Client Side making semi-automated requests.

What's neat, is the Service Worker scripts (which is thereafter stored in the user's browser storage somehow) is able to process things before the page itself loads. So you can do some pretty trippy stuff in terms of downtime redirection and error messages and the like.

[corsair]

@Acen I can start on this, unless you'd like to start on a small example for the world icons and then we can expand to the market results after.

[Acen]

I'd be keen to write the service worker initially from scratch

[corsair]

@Acen Sounds good. We can discuss it more on Slack, or just post updates here as any progress is made.