Boot Dragon if a friendly dragon that will write Spring Boot applications whenever someone sends it a twitter message. It’s designed as a fun way to engage people at conferences.

Boot Dragon listens for tweets then writes a small Spring Boot web application that containing the content of the tweet. The application is saved as a GitHub Gist and a reply is sent the user with a link to the Gist and a small preview animation. There is UI is designed to be displayed whilst all this is going on that shows the dragon furiously typing.

If you want to try the application locally you will need Twitter and GitHub API tokens. You can create them at http://dev.twitter.com and http://github.com. Copy the src/main/resources/application-secret.properties.template to src/main/resources/application-secret.properties and add keys in the appropriate place.

It’s a trick! The start of the animation is always the same, it was created by capturing a screencast then converting it to an animated GIF using ffmpeg and gifsicle:

The last frame is generated dynamically by overlaying the message text onto a picture of a web browser.

Take a look at bootdragon.js and WebUserInterface.java. The web page listens for STOMP messages over a websocket. The UI sends the messages as things are processed.

• Spring Boot

• Spring MVC with WebSockets

• Spring Social

• Thymeleaf