A lot of my bandwidth has been taken up by things in my personal life the past couple of months, but two weeks ago I found the time to start working on a web app to randomly generate a weapon from Splatoon. This isn’t any kind of new thing, there are plenty of them out there already. But I thought it would be fun to build it myself, and keep using the Spring MVC and JBA we covered in class last semester.

I’m using Spring Boot instead of Jakarta this time, and I took the time to learn how to implement Thymeleaf instead of Spring MVC forms, which means I’m using html pages directly instead of jsp pages. Thymeleaf has made it easier to manipulate the objects on the page.

Right now, I have a functioning addWeapon page that has let me fill the database with all of the weapons in the game, and I have a basic page that will return the random weapon. It’s usable for me right now, so the next goal is to make it usable for anyone else.

Next steps include:

• Getting it online. I have to decide what service to use, and how I’m going to keep the database available.
• Dressing it up to be prettier than just basic html.
• Implementing whitelists and blacklists, i.e. “return only weapons that have lethal bombs in their kit” or “exclude chargers”. I need to do some homework on whether the search method I used in my classwork movie project can be adapted, or if I need to take another approach.
• I’d like to have a separate page that will generate an entire random team. This would also implement the whitelists and blacklists, but it gets more complicated when there are four weapons. Are the search terms per weapon or for the whole team? etc.

Link to repo.