Structor – UI Builder for React | Hacker News Reader

Structor – UI Builder for React

helmetrex.com

202 pointsipselon28 comments

I'm author of Structor. Now I'm working on documentation. If you have any questions you want to know, please put the issue on GitHub (https://github.com/ipselon/structor) or write directly to support. Thanks.

Looks promesing, but it looks like the person is still working on it to get it ready.

I don't understand this line: "This project was developed for real-life site on http://helmetrex.com" But the url is the site that you are already on, and it is called StuctorMarket, but Stuctor is something else here: https://github.com/ipselon/structor

"Project" here means the boilerplate on the market. But not the project on the GitHub.

Wow, so many negative comments in here. First of all, thanks to the author for this project! Not that I directly benefit from it, but I appreciate the effort that has gone into taking the pains to make a project of this complexity, setup a website for this and most importantly, open source it! Still requires a bit more polishing, but this project being open source, I see no reason why it wouldn't, pretty soon.

Thank you for your effort!

Thank you, I appreciate your opinion.

I've been waiting to see something like this. Using good practices with React I think it'd be really easy for something like a web Qt to work.

Did you try it already ?

I haven't, I'm speaking more about the concept in general.

Divshot was aquired by Google and probably we will see built-in support for Polymer and Angular in a not so distant release. I guess Helmetrex will face the same destiny under Facebook.

Has anyone tried this with Electron? This seems like the ideal place to arrive at for building GUI components to be used in desktop applications.

I have a discussion about embedding builder into Electron here https://github.com/ipselon/react-ui-builder/issues/10

And I didn't get the answer on my question: how developer will work with this in Electron ?

Yup. I ended up ditching front end frameworks and just using Atom to build a desktop application. Atom has so many packages already it makes it just a matter of figuring out how to put everythung together,

What does the GPLv3 means for users? Does it propagate to the code generated?

I guess not, similar as you can compile non-GPL code using gcc.

I hope the author could use a more permissive license like MIT or BSD though.

He could also keep it GPL3 and make license exemptions that remove ambiguities about the generated code like SWIG does

http://www.swig.org/legal.html

Is there a demo out there? I'd like to try it without installing a bunch of stuff.

No, there is no demo for builder. Structor runs as server on localhost and reads files from local filesystem. So, if there was a demo for each on-line demo session we would have to start new docker container or something like it.

Will this work with React native?

Didn't try so far. Will think about it...

I've really wanted a way to have prototype GUIs be cross platform deployable. Probably there would be demand given the popularity of prototyping tools like zeplin.io, www.invisionapp.com, https://www.flinto.com/, http://framerjs.com, http://giveabrief.com/ and others.

I think the problem is that UIs are not consistent across platforms. Might be fine for prototyping concepts, though.

Neonto is a prototyping-oriented GUI tool that generates iOS and Android code:

http://neonto.com

The code generation is tailored for each platform, so there's no common framework or other library dependencies in the generated project files. Instead the generated code uses the native stuff directly. On iOS that means you get UIViewControllers, UINavigationControllers, UIPageControls etc. Likewise on Android the native equivalents.

Looks good. But problem with all this kind of builders is customisation. Since HTML/JS/CSS is so powerful for customisation, one day as a developer you will realise, this is not helping me in that.

It was said in the sample project on market site: "this project is fully customisable and hackable". You may create and bring in the project any React (and not even React) component you wish.

When team of Material UI components will make stable their library for react 0.14.0 I will publish project with Material UI components on market.

Would it be enough to say that this is customisable ?

BTW, did you try to do something in Structor ?

Seems a shame to couple a widget designer to a particular backend technology.

Could you explain what is shame here ?

Would love to see something like this for Meteor.js as well

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