Connecting Angular Frontend to Spring Backend with a Randomized Board

TLDR

Connected the frontend UI to the backend service by homogenizing their GameState objects and making GET calls repeatedly. Built out logic for randomizing board layout at start of new games. Continuing to refine the OOP object relationships needed for the Finite State Machine.

Main work

• Updating frontend to accept the same GameState format / structure that the Java service uses.
• Implementing random shuffling logic in GameState constructor that conforms to real Catan rules.

Challenges

• We are now fully connected end-to-end, so features now need to maintain functionality in the web UI and the backend service.

Learnings

• Java’s collections libraries have even more useful commands than I thought. For example, the random shuffling logic is as simple as Collections.shuffle(myCollection).