I needed reusable building blocks to render visually pleasing Web UIs from structured data with minimal time to production. Here came the dream opportunity, as an [Illusion Connect](https://www.illusionconnectgame.com) enthusiast, to spin-off *very quickly* an example website featuring some of the work done behind the scenes. Silly excuse for a tech demo, but that's why you are reading this today!

> Front-End as a service for structured data In most websites with a heavy emphasis on content manipulation lies a Content Management System (CMS), sometimes tightly coupled with the front-end, others loosely coupled as can be seen in many of the headless CMS solutions trending nowadays. For developer centric teams, is it worth it to have to deal with a vendor-specific CMS solution to: - support some form of content validation, usually through a data schema - get a content ingestion UI from the get-go - customize the access to data, usually in the form of user rules and roles What if the project gains traction and you want to start accepting external contributions from people ingesting their own data: is a UI and data access management absolutely required to maintain the momentum? For a brand new project and when the data is already clean and can be generated programmatically very fast, not really. Many structured data formats such as [protobuf](https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers) also offer APIs in a myriad of languages to easily enforce a schema over your data while leaving a lot of flexibility to extend it. On **Illusion Connect Hub**, every character and equipment each has its own model. These models are then transformed into page layouts (those being models on their own) which are finally rendered by a content agnostic front-end service. By having the data generation layer completely independent from the actual presentation layer, development iterations are extremely fast and work on both can be carried out concurrently. JSON was chosen as the default modelling language for every *entity* for convenience, as it also offers several bridges between different data formats and fast serialization and deserialization for text-heavy content. The same goes with the page layouts, whose data schemas are not bound to any specific programming language. We are just transforming language-agnostic structured data into other kinds of structured data, in a format parsable by the front-end application. > Content creator focus People close to me and who know me would find it weird that I am suddenly putting out in the wild a project with likely **zero** monetization potential. But sometimes, when you can have some fun while being able to reuse your work for **more projects**, you have to compromise! This page was created from the built-in rich text editor. It supports both plain [Markdown](https://www.markdownguide.org/basic-syntax/) syntax as well as raw HTML code which offers unparalleled flexibility (see below for instance). This would raise some people's eyebrows due to possible abuses, but until then, please do make good use of it. Oh, and also feel free to advertise your own Illusion Connect content here: this is a place designed for it.

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``` > Did I say *Illusion Connect*? On a parting note, never heard about *Illusion Connect*? Well I should have started by this. It is a mobile real-time strategy [gacha game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gacha_game) that allows you to build your characters and partake in several game modes, with some similarity to *Arknights* gameplaywise. However, I never really got hooked to Arknights... Oh, and it has real-time PvP as well!

Beyond a simple Wikipedia – A few words from the creator

by Masuzu