astroturf VS Bulma

CSS-in-JS has been a challenge – we're currently using https://github.com/astroturfcss/astroturf which seemed the simplest zero-runtime-cost option back when we were looking, but the library is starting to feel a bit under-maintained (if the author of Astroturf reads this, we love your work and will do whatever we can to support you in it!). But it's worked well for us over the last 2 years.

Happy to share a component example. We also use a small library for managing CSS classes in a typed fashion, which can also be used by our UI test code to target various elements. So that does add a bit of cryptic boilerplate, but the repo README has an example component with syntax highlighting:

Try https://github.com/4Catalyzer/astroturf

On the other side of our titular question is styled-components. While I'm talking about styled-components specifically, the topics and concepts here apply to any CSS-in-JS provider (e.g. emotion). There is a smaller CSS-in-JS library called astroturf that aims to give the developer the best of all worlds, so the limitations I'll discuss later on don't apply there. But be careful with smaller projects/ones that claim you can have it all! You are wading through uncharted territory :)

Tailwind is great, but creating everything from scratch is annoying. A nice base of components which can be extended with tailwind would be great. There are a few tailwind frameworks like Flowbite, Daisy Ui, but I like Bulma, PicoCSS and Bootstrap.

I would talk about building the frontend, but it is just a single page React app I built quickly. It does use a CSS library called Bulma, which is similar to tailwind and worth checking out. I did spend a day implementing a login/signup page, but this was just for the learning experience, and not what I wanted in the final product.

After finding a few spare hours I decided to address the alerts and update some my dependencies. I spent several hours debugging my Gatsby site after doing some recommended npm package updates. My UI class library Bulma was not being loaded by my sass-loader module. (I later learned that they migrated to dart-sass so I guess the fix should have been a pretty easy). Nonetheless, this prompted me to rethink my entire static site generator stack and got me curious about some other options. Why have these unnecessarily complex dependency chains? At that point I was almost too hesitant to even touch my package.json file. That's just silly.

Oh wow, quite happy about this, for a while it seemed the project was abandoned, really glad Jeremy keeps working on this :) The new website (https://bulma.io/) also looks very slick. I could totally see that he'd be able to monetize this like Tailwind, it's a really well thought-out framework with a good compromise between responsiveness, utility classes and components.

So, our post.component.html component is the generic page where all posts will have their content loaded. Here, the classes are from the Bulma CSS framework, and the template looks like this:

This is a pretty basic HTML that contains a form with a couple of form fields and a submit button. To make styling a little easier, I opted to use Bulma. But that’s entirely optional, and does nothing to impact our app.

Since v1.9.0 release, the Gowebly CLI includes support for Bootstrap and Bulma CSS frameworks.

Bulma is a lightweight and modern CSS framework that simplifies the styling of your web projects. It offers a clean and intuitive set of classes to structure and design your HTML elements, providing a quick and easy way to create visually appealing layouts. Bulma is responsive and mobile-friendly, making it an excellent choice for developers who want a straightforward and flexible solution for their projects. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced coder, Bulma's simplicity and versatility make it a popular option for building stylish and responsive web interfaces without the need for extensive customization.