Structor – React UI Builder
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github.com
But, ideally I would say here is this database. Let users be able to easily add and update it and search/sort quickly.
I feel react is built to do things like this quite fast. Seen some great examples of autofill and sorted/filtered massive tables within a brilliant UI. Having the ability to work on independently on components also seems like a huge benefit but all solutions seem rather frankenstein-ish.
Maybe I suck. I wish I could find someone to pay that could take the database (or a grouping of csvs) and set up what I'm looking for. Sadly I've tried and the best solution has been hacking together on my own something that "works" but it's not great.
This is why I keep being attracted to these scaffolds hoping one will "click."
Old data is fun!
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.11/howto/legacy-database...
Alternately, you can generate models that fit your data set and import them via Django's ORM and some simple scripting.
Filtering and csv import/export are not built in, but that should be in the application code anyway.
https://starter.cxjs.io/admin/orders
Tools like (i.e. WYSIWYG editing suites) this have a yield point of usefulness and I am not sure open source can get there. There are very few exceptions (Gimp and Audacity spring to mind).
Without WYSIWYG and current web dev you can bring it to a whiteboard and hash out a design and then find out that for some reason that it is really annoying to make work well on everything you need to support. It's really the consensus driver that makes WYSIWYG always a very helpful tool.
No, I haven't, and I was developing before the web existed. I don't doubt there may be much better tools for some things outside the web, but none for a platform with all those features.
Canvas and WebGL 2.0 still feel like the early days of shading based rendering.
If you don't want younger developers to reinvent the wheels you have used for ages, take some under your wing and mentor them.
But hey, complaining on Hacker News about "kids these days" is edgy and gets you upvotes, right?
And then once upon a time, there was Dreamweaver, which nobody mentions. There is also Adobe Edge. I've watched a designer put together a nice looking website very quickly in Edge. I've also seen what they could do with the WP theme builders.
But then you still need someone to tweak the css, and add JS for custom stuff separate from the builder.
The hope is that using Reactive programming, you won't need to wrestle what comes out of the tool, since the underlying language and programming model is finally capable of truly supporting components without lots of glue code, boilerplate and exceptions.
You may be interested in what my team is building: https://haiku.ai
Haiku is a UI-builder modeled after Flash, FPGA design tools, VB, Qt, even a dash of HyperCard and Unity. We've sought to 'invent' as little as possible, while adapting proven solutions to the many quirks and challenges of the Web.
If you're curious at all, I encourage you to join our beta list and shoot me an email for access: zack@haiku.ai
HTML/JS is catching up with with Flash a decade ago.
Flash wasn't a bad technology per se (security issues in the plugin aside). It was just annoying, in the same way HTML5/JS is now annoying. When people want to do user-hostile things they will do user-hostile things, no matter what technology stack is popular.
With React, you functionally describe how the UI looks in every possible state.
That's how Qt works too (and the designer is prettier imho) : https://youtu.be/Ko3YPM_tStM?t=47
That seems very wasteful if what you want to do is just to show a bunch of extra controls if a small part of the state changes.
Later when he works with bindings, that's closer, but the expression still had to be written in as code, so no win there. Plus it's classic data-binding, where it can only affect pre-defined properties (usually of primitive types), but not the entire structure of the component.
With reactive programming being primarily functional, it should be relatively easy to refactor the output of a tool like this. You could split the states into its common components, maybe even using visual tools in the designer itself without having to touch the generated code.
I don't know if this tool will be able to do that, but I've seen that approach used in mockup tools for rapid prototyping. The only part missing in those tools to allow the interface designer to build the interaction logic by themselves was a sane code generator. With a language like React, I believe the generated code will resemble something usable, which was impossible when UI designers generated imperative or object-oriented code.
I wonder if drag-and-drop tools really provide that much value compared to just editing a component with instant live-preview on the side.
Obviously, you don't need to know how to code, but many designers know at least HTML/CSS. You could have some nice basic DSL, plus a good set of layout components that hide the CSS ugliness in this area.
The "code" you would need to write would be little more than JSX with some basic `if`s and `forEach`es, because you are only writing the render function.
The props and state could then be manipulated inside the tool to see all the possible variations (you could even add new props/state fields if you need them, and then export this structure as TypeScript interfaces). You would have a list of components on the side, like the tool in the OP does, to help with discovery.
The idea is to have both. Finally this is possible thanks to reactive programming.
UI designers make mockup tools that basically support that kind of rule-making with drag and drop, but that logic cannot be exported to the development environment, only the visual components.
With a tool like the one in the article, this will be possible, and UI designers will be able to create the basic user interactions by themselves in the prototyping tool, rather than having to write them down in English in a specification document for developers to re-write them in a proper language.
I'm not sure if it's a good idea to allow actual interactions (`setState`, etc.) to be handled by a tool like this. The whole idea of such a tool is that you can develop components relatively in isolation, without having to mess with the application code.
When doing just the look of a component as a pure function (just the render function and nothing else), that can be achieved, but as soon as you allow the design to have side-effects, that isolation is gone.
Unless that's not what you meant...
A UI designer should be able to develop the interactions over a single component isolated. For example they could define a "Send form" event and tie it to the button and the "Enter" keypress all from the visual designer, just like you would do it in code.
In reactive programming, the effects of each interaction don't need to be represented as side-effects, but as output of events over a functional and composable "stream". UI designers can learn to think in that programming model, which is way saner than callback hell.
For example, you have an action that will ask some remote server whether the user has a permission to do something, and if it receives a positive response, it performs that action and only then updates the UI (and shows the error UI if the user doesn't have the permission).
With a tool like this, you could easily create an interaction that updates the UI immediately. It would look correct, but it would be wrong.
>For example they could define a "Send form" event and tie it to the button and the "Enter" keypress all from the visual designer, just like you would do it in code.
That's fine, but I don't count that as an interaction. In React, you would just define that as a prop and pass it to the buttons and the keypress event, so that would be ok. `setState` would not be ok (unless it only stays in the mockup and is not exported).
Why couldn't you just go into the code and specify the error UI? You still have JS/React available to you at any point. The GUI tool is just to aid with rapidly building stuff, not as a replacement. We're not talking about a visual programming language here.
And if handling error cases is expected, then the tool could provide an option for specifying error UIs.
Because usability professionals typically don't know how to code.
> The GUI tool is just to aid with rapidly building stuff, not as a replacement.
My point in this thread is that, with a tool like this, it could be.
I said elsewhere that mockup tools used by UI designers already have a development environment very close to this one, and only a good code generator is missing.
A mockup environment which can communicate logic to the devs, and not just visuals, is everything these professionals need to create specifications fully in software without resorting to natural language that the developer needs to interpret.
> With a tool like this, you could easily create an interaction that updates the UI immediately. It would look correct, but it would be wrong.
This also happens if you build the component in code, no? I fail to see how this is specific to a visual tool. A professional should take care of all cases, regarding of the medium of the tool.
> That's fine, but I don't count that as an interaction.
That was just the simplest example I came up with in ten seconds. For more complex examples of what interactions you can build purely with a visual tool that then spits code, see Apparatus [1] or Stop drawing dead fish. [2]
I can imagine building components easily in an environment like that. We already could do that in the Flash/ActionScript environment in a limited fashion, but the results were very limited (state could only be represented as a video timeline), and the platform itself was terrible.
If you want to do it correctly in the tool and tie the UI update to the "permission granted" response, that event (or part of a store, or however it's implemented) already has to be defined in code (even if it's just a stub) by the time you're making the UI.
So again, this breaks the isolation because the component in the tool now has to know about this.
In contrast, if you're writing the component in code, and find something missing, you can just go "oh, guess I'll just add that to the appropriate place".
I can imagine the tool exporting some kind of interface with a list of things it needs (project-wide, across different components), that the developers would then implement, but with that we're getting pretty far from existing real-world React patterns. It's also starting to approach the difficulty of just learning to code in the first place.
That's a good point. A visual tool for building components will need a testing feature that can keep all those stubs. But isn't that just like Test-Driven Development?
> It's also starting to approach the difficulty of just learning to code in the first place.
Not at all.
In any design, you'll have to think about all the cases thoroughly and systematically; and any rational people can do that. But coding in a general purpose language has the additional requirement of having a mental model of the execution platform and conveying precise instructions; it's not enough to think in terms of the problem being solved. That makes all the difference to people without coding experience.
The syntax of programming languages is particularly tricky and difficult to learn. The people working with Chris Granger, the designer of Light Table, found that users of visual development tools find it incredibly difficult to understand scope. And coding in any modern general PL is all about scope.
You may think of this kind of visual environment as a particular Domain Specific Language. The users are coding in it, but the programming language is not general purpose, which makes it not "coding" as developers understand it.
> I can imagine the tool exporting some kind of interface with a list of things it needs (project-wide, across different components), that the developers would then implement
BTW, the mockup tools I'm talking about already offer that kind of interfaces to define the list of coding requirements generated by the user interface prototype. They cough up that list of requirements as a Word document or web page, though. Wouldn't it be best to generate those as placeholders in code?
I've made games with react and I have no idea what that means.
With "traditional" libraries, you either have to imperatively mutate the initial UI (e.g. `button.setText`, `layout.addWidget(new Button)`, `removeWidget(button2)`) or use data-bindings which are pretty limited and you often have to adapt your data for them.
With React, you write the `render()` function that answers the question "given this state, how does the UI look?".
Am I missing something (such as sarcasm?) from your comment?
[1] https://github.com/guyroyse/gilded-rose-javascript/blob/mast...