exhibitor VS hof

TL;DR: A React front-end component workshop, a simple version of Storybook.

So around 5 months ago, I needed a tool to preview front-end (React) components whilst I create them for a personal project of mine. There were two options: Storybook or Ladle.

Storybook is the tool everybody knows. I've used it before quite a lot. It's very big, full-fat, supports loads of use-cases, etc.

Ladle comes out of Uber. It's very small, lean, and doesn't support that much. After trying it out for a while, it just gives me a feeling like it's a 20% project to learn some new tech.

So I realised that I wanted something kind of in the middle. Something that's a bit more customizable than Ladle, but something much simpler and less intrusive than Storybook.

This led me to create Exhibitor (https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor) (https://demo.exhibitor.dev).

I worked on it on-and-off for a couple months, and it ended up being something that I'm quite proud of. It's not perfect, and supports only a fraction of what Storybook does, however for a tool made by 1 engineer vs the 20+ for Storybook, I'm quite happy about it!

Exhibitor, a snappy & delightful React component workshop, is GA. My aim is for Exhibitor to be an extremely fast, easy to use, and delightful tool for creating front-end component libraries.

It's been around 2 months since my last mention and quite a tonne has changed.

Wiki: https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor/wiki

Looks interesting. Coincidentally, I've just completed the bulk of work on a distributed Websocket network system to synchronize certain bits of state between multiple clients for my own kind of Storybook tool [0]. How interesting!

This kind of tool is exactly what I would have needed, instead of the approach I've taken which is a bit kludgy, grass-roots, novice-like, etc.

Good work :)

[0] https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor/pull/22

I was a bit deflated when my submission about https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor fell through the HN floor-boards.

Think Storybook but simpler, faster, better Typescript support, and uses esbuild by default.

...Is the aim. I'm the sole lead dev working on it at the moment up against the ~10-20 strong team who built most of Storybook, so it's a long road ahead, but it's growing into something I'm quite proud of and happy about.

For a auth product, you probably should go with traditional code generation, not LLMs (re: all the unsolvable problems they have (hallucinations, incomplete code answers). For an auth product, you want something definite and reproducible, or you are asking for trouble.

If you are interested in a flexible code gen framework, I built one that had this very use case in mind. (https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof)

I'd be happy to think / talk this through with you

I recently built a TUI for exploring and developing CUE, JSON, Yaml.

Large inspiration for the overall UX comes from the Bloomberg terminal, where every function is reachable with four letter shortcut from the command box. It was really the command box that I liked. I've also built a sort of "flex" panel component for the layout so you can create as many panels as you like.

https://docs.hofstadter.io/getting-started/hof-tui/

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/tree/_dev/lib/tui

Many business analysts use SQL, have for a long time. They are probably not your target audience. With the problem being JAVA specific, you'd likely want to start there

This sounds similar to the goals of my hof tool (https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof), lift type definitions out of code so they can be defined in one place, then generate the code for all the places. Is that sounding like what you are after?

Having built something similar, the biggest challenge for users is that they have to use a bespoke language, like WASP here. I suspect that it is also your biggest challenge as well.

Mine is built on CUE, which at least has the potential to become a more widely used language. CUE hasn't reached sufficient maturity for broader adoption yet, so I continue to face this same problem.

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof

Here's a big one I needed to get ChatGPT to do something more sophisticated with a JSON object response (predates functions and all that)

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/blob/_dev/flow/chat/pro...

It no longer worked after a model update some time ago, haven't tried recently.

I found codellama to be much better for this and require fewer instructions, an anecdotal validation for smaller, focussed models

I was surprised out how you can define arbitrary grammars using arbitrary formulation and it would follow it. Of course you have to redo the prompt every time there is an update... such a pain

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/blob/_dev/flow/chat/pro...

CUE is indeed a beautiful language, will get those mind juices flowing for sure!

There is more work to be done on the codec implementation, but if you just want to split yaml/json across files, CUE is a great option

You might also like my project, built on CUE: https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof We have a TUI where you can explore and work with CUE, JSON, Yaml

You can pretty much make up any pseudo grammar like this one, which is a reduced JSON object that is close to CUE: https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/blob/_dev/flow/chat/pro...

No need to be formal or use a standard format

Yea, in particular for this project, they have created a bespoke templating system.

You can get the same thing with Go text/templates by adding chat function(s) as custom a helper: https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/blob/_dev/lib/templates...

100% one of the best things about building a TUI is not having the pain of modern web development. I do think there is a way to have a CLI & TUI come from the same code, so you can get the best of both, or pick the best for the task at hand.

experiments in progress here: https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/tree/_dev/lib/tui