The first (and presumably namesake) company is Ant Financial https://www.antgroup.com, which is described as:
> Ant Financial Services Group ("Ant Financial"), was officially founded in October 2014 and originated from Alipay which is the world's leading third-party payment platform founded in 2004.
So basically if Bootstrap came out of Twitter, this came out of Alibaba and Co. Big name behind it.
Hey, can you tell us more? I'm very interested in Weex :) What make it solid ? what are the pros/cons ? Last time I checked I thought I need to know chinese as 95% of issues are in chinese for example. Is it still a prob ?
> Last time I checked I thought I need to know chinese
Fascinating. This is probably the first time I've seen a huge open source project where a majority of the contributions are in a language that's not English. I've seen plenty of projects from non-native English speakers, but everything was still done in English.
I'm sure there are tons of other big projects in Chinese and other languages, but programming has always been very English-centric. I had heard of programming languages that use other languages or alphabets, but they were all very esoteric.
I've also seen people using foreign languages for class and method names, while all of the framework APIs and programming language keywords were English.
So I guess it's only fair that I should learn some Chinese. Weex does look very good.
It's funny how all of the Java variables and keywords, HTML tags, and the CSS is all English (or at least, programming languages based on English words), while the issue details are written in Chinese. It's a really interesting mix.
I wonder if there are transpilers that let people write code in their native language, and then convert everything into English source code. It should be very easy, it's just a search/replace for keywords like "public", "protected", "length", "super", "return", etc. etc.
Wikipedia has a list of programming languages written in other "human languages"[0], but they are pretty obscure for the most part.
At the end of the day, english has "won" as the language of keywords in programming. And while i'm glad that most newer languages have the ability to code everything but keywords in your native language (i've worked with JS that has variables and function names in other scripts), translating the keywords seems like a pointless process that would do nothing but cause incompatibility.
Can you be more explicit? I just want to make sure i understand you correctly. Do you believe Ionic 2 is better?
I'm looking at the demos now, but my main concern is how these behave on mobile apps. Performance, ease of development, etc. I have little concern for how they behave on my mac, fwiw. (performance on my mac may be related to mobile performance, but due to the very different architecture behind ReactNative style mobile apps, i'm skeptical to compare desktop performance)
Sorry, I actually thought Weex is another HTML5/Cordova thingy, but it appears to be more like React Native and calls native components. I have no experience with Weex running on the device. I just found the web demos unsatisfying.
This stuff is horrible to use from the keyboard visually, because outlines have been removed without an adequate replacement. Please fix the styles for :focus et al. Make it all obvious, like Microsoft have done in Windows 10 (they have what is pretty much just a 2px solid black outline).
Yeah. I second this. Having non-obvious focus state is a deal-breaker. Obviously, it can be manually added in via CSS overrides on top of this library, but it would be nice for the library itself to have decent focus states.
a11y should be the top priority ... especially if you want to see use in countries where there are penalties for sites not complying with disability discrimination legislation.
Another issue is your DropDown breaks the power user convention of being able to type the first letter (or more) of an item and the dropdown selecting it.
Blueprint is another React UI kit that was posted here recently. They have interesting focus management feature where focus outlines are _only_ shown when navigating via keyboard. This is a nice balance since those active focus outlines can be obnoxious/annoying when _not_ using keyboard navigation.
I tried using these components in Buttercup (our open source password vault https://github.com/buttercup-pw/buttercup), but immediately regretted it. It's impossible to theme, the less/css files are dirty and not extensible, defaults mess with your current style, etc.
At first look, it looks promising and great but not when you actually try to use it.
Antd is an official implementation of the ant design language. If you read their introduction (https://ant.design/docs/spec/introduce) you'll see they target "middleware" products (or 中台应用, which actually should be translated to internal applications) which don't require customized UI and theming.
Some really beautiful components like the TreeSelect in there, not trivial to build at all.
That said, the first time I loaded the page sure took a long time. Kind of sad to need Webpack to create chunks just to recreate the old effect of not loading all the content for your website all at once.
I concur. I run browser only in half of the wide-screen monitor (makes sense, doesn't it?), and it's surprising how many websites are broken in this configuration.
I like it, there have been a couple projects where this would have cut time in half.
Some of the controls were hard to navigate on an iPad Pro. Time in particular was hard to use, not enough space. This is a fault of the resolution of the pro, but if the targets aren't big enough, I'm scrolling the page instead of the hours.
BluePrint is a great UI toolkit. Ant Design is not only a UI toolkit, it's a design guideline which likes Material[1] and antd[2] it a official implement of Ant Design.
Blueprint is meant for desktop applications. For example, Electron apps. You'll notice Blueprint tries to give that desktop app feel, versus Antd, which does not.
I believe they meant desktop-feel as opposed to mobile first (mostly because some consider Material to be a mobile-first decision). Additional Note: Blueprint doesn't go out of it's way to degrade nicely for mobile screen sizes for most components and doesn't provide the grid layout or progressive embeds typically associated with mobile-friendly UI libraries.
I believe they fixed that. However, either way, I appreciate the contribution of Palantir. Really do not think it is good to ridicule the company for open sourcing their tech.
The actual components seem interesting. The odd part of this seems to be the building/requiring process. It seems that there are some implicit dependencies on webpack, which are not well spelled out.
It appears the team chose to make an oddly generically named babel plugin: `babel-plugin-import` which seems to do some manipulation of CSS/SASS/etc styles (which seems out of scope for babel). I assume the generic name was chosen hoping other libraries would embrace a similar pattern, however, I'm not seeing any spec defining how another library should implement this.
The site has some really good components. The only stopping me from using it is its not designed with mobile in mind. You don't get bootstrap like classes 'col-md-6 col-sm-12'. The grid is percentage based.
This looks promising! How does this compare to BlueprintJS [0]?
While I did like some components from Antd and intend to look into the source, from a basic overview, a lot of the documentation seems to be in Chinese.
This is the nicest collection of web UX components I've ever seen (better than bootstrap). All of the look and feel (responsiveness and delays) are just right. Animations are not too heavy-handed and add to the experience.
Is this by Stripe? The components look just like their dashboard.
It's actually super light, i don't know where you got the impression that it's heavy. This is not a monolith but a modular kit - you only load what you use which makes it different from many other UI kits which give you megabytes of CSS on first load.
Also, this is native HTML and CSS of course, with proper definition, types and handlers laying out what the component can do:
To "just" use self contained, configurable, property-defined components that can be shared, re-used, filled with state - that isn't trivial. Which is why they're React components. The components themselves are very lean, there's a bit of code, some markup, a piece of CSS and that's that. The code i have linked compiles down to a couple of bytes.
This is really well executed, well done. I noticed a link to data visualization and graphics pages, but unfortunately I don't read chinese. Are there plans to wrap that stuff up in React in a similar fashion?
I don't want to be that guy, and probably will be downvoted for being negative, but why does everything load so slow?
People on this thread are saying it's the network speed thing, coming from china and all, but isn't this supposed to have downloaded all the js modules initially?
I just keep thinking "it would have been much faster and I wouldn't have to wait for these progress bars to finish if it were just a static page".
Why does a documentation need a progress bar anyway?
The minified version of this library is about 1MB but loading individual modules is possible. I haven't checked my own net tab but I presume the site uses chunking in order to avoid downloading the entire library on the initial load.
The data is static and it is probably a SPA, but it's not all loaded on the initial load.
These components look and work great, but unfortunately are a real headache to retheme unless you want to pull in a sass/less toolchain in addition to what you're currently using. This is a pain in the ass if you already have your theme variables set up in one compiles-to-CSS language.
There is a standard for CSS variables and a very functional subset of their functionality can be compiled for older browsers at build time: http://cssnext.io, yet as far as I can tell, all of these component frameworks impose some other nonstandard compiles-to-CSS language or one of many possible APIs for writing inline styles.
Inline styles seem to be a trend at the moment but I can only assume the people driving this movement haven't had the experience of working with 3rd party components (which you may or may not have the source for) and needing to alter something the designers didn't expose and simply having no simple options because the damn inline style can't be overridden even by !important. Now you've got to fork whole the f'ing component, possibly multiple, each of which potentially coming with yet another different compiles-to-CSS toolchain all because you wanted to add a single line of CSS.
Admittedly, antd doesn't use inline styles si the above doesn't apply here, but having to maintain a custom builder for antd in order to change some fonts and a few colors was a frustrating experience. Not sure what a good solution is until CSS variables get more browser adoption, but it'd be great if we could collectively start standardizing on standards.
Theming is on of the big reasons we saw the need to make styled-components[0] (new lib to style React apps and component libraries)
I'm one of the maintainers of ElementalUI, and Glen Maddern, the styled-components co-creator, one of the creators of CSS Modules. One of the biggest downsides of CSS Modules (and, by extension, every other styles in JavaScript library right now) is that theming is simply impossible. Building third-party component libraries is hard enough, but providing an easy-to-theme API wasn't a solved problem in the React world. Nobody has done it properly, and there is no agreed-upon way of doing this!
styled-components has built-in theming support[1] to solve this exact problem. (note: this is CSS-in-JS, not inline styles[2], so overriding is easy as pie too[3]) We're rebuilding ElementalUI with it right now and the next versions of react-toolbox and Belle will be built with it as well.
We also have ReactNative support, which nobody else has done before. Just because you're writing a universal React app with a third-party component library shouldn't mean switching between three or four different APIs to style your app. With styled-components, you can just use styled-components no matter what you're styling!
(If you're reading this, I'd love to have a chat with the Antd people about maybe moving to styled-components! You can reach me on Twitter at @mxstbr, just ping me there!)
I've been using Antd components for the last year in some my project. All components are also available here[0] as single modules for better reusability and customization.
Currently, I have solved all my theming goals with Plain CSS. For each component, that I'd like to customize I created a wrapper
import Slider from 'rc-slider';
function StyledSlider(props) {
return <Slider className="my-slider" {...props} />
}
(This is a very simplified example, just shows the way).
I have read about styled-components, but I don't understand how it would help me with theming. I don't think that rewriting every component from LESS to styled-components to make possible to use ThemeProvider will be an option because it doesn't give you any benefits comparing with customization guide[1], that also gives you good enough way to override defaults.
The TL;DR is that this customization guide will suddenly become really easy. Antd can specify a default theme and users can override the parts of the default theme they want!
All the user has to do is pass a single prop to the ThemeProvier and override what they want:
On top of that different parts of your app can have different themes. Making your sidebar dark but your main component light is not an issue – just wrap them in two ThemeProviders with different themes:
It's also all dynamic, meaning you can let the users of your app provide custom themes for your app and it'll automatically apply.
Compare that with the current customization guide, not only do users have to use webpack, they also have to use specific plugins just to make customization of third-party components work! It's also all global, which means styling the sidebar dark and the main area light is impossible since it's all just Less variables applied at build time. This also makes it very hard to have user supplied themes.
Does that make it clear enough how using styled-components would help with theming? :-)
The ability to apply different overrides for some branches in a component tree is powerful. Sure, I will come back to styled-components when I will get that issue.
Currently, I (as well as most users, I suppose) just need to apply some global color overrides to match with company's brand guidelines that I can solve it with old good plain CSS.
Also, for big projects, like Antd, transition to some other CSS-tooling almost impossible, because CSS/LESS code is spread across several repositories and will take a lot of efforts and time.
And finally, the current implementation is better because it doesn't mention styles in Javascript at all, so the library users are able to choose any way to style components without extra efforts from the side of library authors.
You can choose to style styled components any way you want too! You can pass in class names, inline styles, whatever you want just works. No need to be aware of styled-components from the user side at all.
Imagine Button being a styled component, all of the usual methods work perfectly fine:
You say "just" apply some global color overrides, but to "just" apply some global color overrides you need to use webpack (using another bundler? Sorry, antd is not for you) and use atool-build or have to configure webpack to work the way they need it to.
Or you create a custom less file, but that means you'll load all the styling for all components even though you really only wanted to use e.g. the Button.
That's not really "just" overriding a global color, is it? ;-)
I'm not saying this is a trivial change at all by the way, I understand the cost of it since I'm doing it for ElementalUI. I don't know if the antd maitainers will consider it worth it, that's another discussion.
A big issue I see with CSS-in-JS at this moment is server-side-rendering and caching. You started working on a babel-transform for extracting static styles but seem to have changed your mind about actually extracting that to a css-file[1]. Requiring a JS-parser to apply the styles is the wrong approach but might be a stepping stone as it's probably an easier problem to solve. Separating JS and CSS should improve performance somewhat as the browsers can run the scripting and styling engine separately. In the end I'd like a transformation that creates one CSS-file per JS-file so that common chunks can be combined by webpack, gaining high cache hit percentage on sites that uses reloads. Transformations should also be applied to the JS so that SSR doesn't have to calculate styles each time.
I think the work you are doing right can be a stepping stone for something great! The advantages of more traditional methods of creating CSS are ahead-of-time-compilation, splitting/bundling (combine common chunks to achieve low cache invalidation, low transfer size, and high cache hits with few files), and no waiting for the JS-engine to parse and convert your internal data structure.
SPA-SSR is in general a lot more CPU-heavy than the more traditional approach of instantiating templates. We need to find ways of minimising the redundant calculations performed by the server to regain the performance we lost in the transition from templates to SPA-SSR. A source code transformation that extracts CSS and removes static JS is one such step.
The SSR API is a good start but completely trashes cache + creates a large .html each time you reload. The .html returned can most often not be cached so we should strive to minimise its size. The problem of caching/minimising server load is not the easiest to solve but we should be long on our way if we can analyse/signal what parts are static and which are dynamic.
It is not a headache to retheme them. It is pretty easy, the easiest i've seen in a UI kit. You have style and classname overrides in place, scoped css classnames and LESS.
If you use a CSS react-lib like React-CSJS, styling this is easy as pie.
Theming is a difficult problem. Each component has a couple of visual properties which may depend on the state (hover, focus, error, internal variable). Having a separate variable for each visual property would be a nightmare.
You can separate component Style into - BASE + States classes.
classnames[0] can used to use multiple classes, the classes can be activated using component state. This provides a viable solution for Structure & Style.
This is useful for structuring components internally, but sadly doesn't help solve the theming issue at all :-(
What you want from theming is a global skin. You want users of your component library to be able to say "I want all of my buttons to be red" without having to wrap the component or pass a prop to every component. (simplified example)
Doing so just with class names is very very hard. It's what we've done for ElementalUI (together with Less), but it just doesn't work – it's a pita for users!
SCSS (and to a lesser degree LESS) are basically industry standard now, if you are using react, you are almost certainly using one of the two preprocessors.
I don't think your complaint is relevant here, especially since you provide no solution.
It bothers me that this reply is at the top of the comments.
The argument about inline styles is valid, in my opinion. I've had to fork and keep updating from upstream several react components for the exact same reason.
I don't really see much of a need for preprocessors w/ css modules, post css, css in js, etc. It seems like preprocessors are becoming less popular, not more.
I fail to understand this criticism. React Components expose a class hierarchy which can be namespaced well by their designers (if Antd isn't already doing this). Extending / theming with your specific CSS pre-processor is then pretty straightforward.
Doing it this way requires overriding every single built-in rule that uses the property you're trying to override… including states like :hover, :before, :disabled, :disabled and :hover, etc which can be easy to miss.
I've had some success with simple find & replace preprocessor but this gets complicated if the CSS uses colour manipulation functions e.g.
color: color(var(--color-base) tint(50%)), then you're basically going to be re-implementing their whole stylesheet again.
Also, good luck making sure everything still works if and when the components are updated.
Ideally, you alter theme variables in one place, rather than finding and overriding them everywhere they're applied.
I want to speak generally about new UI components, since this is the 2nd post in a week (about a new library of UI components) that reached front page (that I've seen) which are not addressing what I see as a fundamental issue that future UI libraries should address.
For mobile platforms specifically. Now on the surface you can say that UI libraries these days, more or less, will work similarly if not exactly the same across platforms. I would say for most "types" of components this will be true. But form input field behavior is different enough between mobile platforms that I'm questioning why we aren't moving quickly away from native HTML form input fields.
I totally get the argument for accessibility (probably a lot of accessibility platforms depend on these fields), but even accessibility standards such as ARIA, because of some of these inconsistencies, should be pushing toward this goal (decoupling the form input UI components from native HTML form input fields) I think.
Does anyone else here have a strong opinion one way or another as far as their experience building PWA's on mobile where they've encountered the differences between platforms (I'm specifically familiar with Android vs. iOS)? Do you find the differences to be easy to work around? I'm especially interested in feedback from folks who have required some relatively detailed behaviors, such as consistency in how input fields behave when "tabbing" to the next / previous field, or how the "input type='time'" fields behave differently in terms of when DOM events fire while setting time. Or how native keyboard behaviors / layouts are sufficiently different that you'd prefer to have a way to make the experience within your app more consistent?
The first (and presumably namesake) company is Ant Financial https://www.antgroup.com, which is described as:
> Ant Financial Services Group ("Ant Financial"), was officially founded in October 2014 and originated from Alipay which is the world's leading third-party payment platform founded in 2004.
So basically if Bootstrap came out of Twitter, this came out of Alibaba and Co. Big name behind it.