react-styleguidist VS react-admin

react-styleguidist

My most popular open source project, React Styleguidist, has over 10K stars on GitHub, and yet, I couldn’t manage to build a community around it, and to make it self-sufficient. The project is too big for one person to build it, and to manage issues and pull requests.

React Styleguidist is a tool that generates a living style guide for React components. This tool helps developers to document and showcase their components, making it easier for other developers to understand and use them. You can visit its official website to learn more: https://react-styleguidist.js.org/.

Because documentation is so important, our sample project has been preconfigured with React Styleguidist, a development environment for building React components. We’ll use this tool to document the components as we build them out.

Today I had to present my work on a React Native app for the last 2 months in a meeting in front of the CEO. He was pleased with my work the only critique was more comments and documentation. Afterward my immediate supervisor told me to look up "Documentation Style Guides". He said he's not concerned which pattern I chose just learn one and stick with it. After searching I found this https://react-styleguidist.js.org/documenting which seems to address what I'm looking for. I just figured I would ask if anyone else out there has experience with a certain approach and has good documentation/tutorials to learn such an approach. Thanks in advance!

Checkout React Styleguidist by Clicking here

For many years I was enjoying working on my open source projects of all sizes: large like React Styleguidist or a tiny library that nobody else is using. However, the expectation that you owe someone free work to fix bugs in their projects and add features they need to do their job, the rude comments on the issues, the hit and run pull requests where you spend an hour reviewing the code and the author never comes back to answer your comments, made it less and less enjoyable, and my attempts to pretend that it doesn’t hurt my mental health became less and less successful.

This is yet another tool that offers an interactive way of creating and sharing UI components. And there’s no better representation of how React Styleguidist works than this GIF. On the right window, you have the code. The left window is where that code is concurrently rendered into a UI. And if required, you can also test and directly edit the code on the rendered side.

You can play with these examples along with my other components in this library directly within the documentation, which was generated using React Styleguidist.

So far, it seems that Storybook with it's interactive props and canvas playground is the most popular solution. Simplified versions, like Styleguidist or Docz do not provide enough props and canvas playground functionality to see them as alternatives. I would consider these two only valid documentation alternatives, but not for active development like Storybook.

> "Are there examples of companies adopting this model?"

Many examples across the industry:

- Autodesk AutoCAD (closed) + Plugins/Addons (many open)

- MS Windows (closed) + Many 3rd party programs (open)

- Github (closed) + Github Actions (open)

- Npm (closed) + Npm modules (mostly open)

> "What are the potential benefits or pitfalls?"

Benefits:

- Harder to replicate, the company gets to keep the "secret sauce" a secret

- Opening up a way to "extend" the platform means 3rd party developers add value to your system

- The core isn't open, so less effort is required to maintain compare to OpenSource

Pitfalls:

- Closed-source is hard to verify, company is essentially saying "trust me bro"

- Less innovation, as user's can't contribute to the core

> "How does it impact community engagement and software adoption?"

There's hardcore FOSS advocates that will hate anything not fully open. But a business has to make money and protect it's IP, having a "closed core" is one way to do that and ensure a sustainable business model.

Another approach is the opposite, open-core + closed-premium-addons. An example of this is "React Admin"

- Open Core -> https://github.com/marmelab/react-admin

- Premium Modules Offering -> https://react-admin-ee.marmelab.com/

Official Website: https://marmelab.com/react-admin/

React-Admin is a React-based frontend framework for building admin applications that talk to a backend data API. It offers a pluggable mechanism for easily adapting to the specific API style of your backend.

With these features, data fetching and forms become significantly easier to implement in React. However, creating a great user experience involves integrating all these hooks, which can be complex. Alternatively, you can use a framework like react-admin where user-friendly forms with optimistic updates are built-in.

31.react-admin

For the admin panel, or basically anything with basic crud operations, take a look at https://marmelab.com/react-admin/. Most frontend devs don't like it, since it limits you somewhat in customization, but at the same time, it is very easy to grasp for someone coming from a backend dev profile, who just wants a crud UI. It even has a guesser template that proposes an initial screen layout based on the response of your api, which you can then copy-paste and finetune. It is really made to make quick admin crud ui's.

We’ve developed a business based on an open-source platform called react-admin. Embracing the open-source spirit, we’re sharing the key performance indicators of this business. We hope it will help other open-source developers build their own business.

React-Admin: As the name suggests, this component library is targeted at building administrator interfaces for B2B (business-to-business), for example, managing users in your system. It is based on Material design and has a neat feature where you can let it “guess” your list views by providing a sample API endpoint for your data.

- We want a solution that creates CRUD (create, read, update, delete) quickly and requires minimal effort. - We want to be able to create some sort of complex interface if the task requires it. - We make cool, beautiful projects, so we want a visually pleasing solution. - We want the solution to be independent of the language on the back-end, because, for example, we started with PHP, Laravel, but over time node.js, Go appeared in the stack. In short, we want fast, beautiful and custom. We've had time to poke at various off-the-shelf solutions that we've been advised. They're good, but: - they are created specifically for some frameworks / languages like laravel, node.js - they can only generate CRUDs with a rigidly defined structure, where you can't implement or customize anything of your own. - they can't be styled Here's what we've been looking at Control Panels for Laravel: https://demo.backpackforlaravel.com/admin/dashboard Not a very pretty solution in our opinion. And the promo page has nice screenshots, not the demo "well such". https://orchid.software/en/ Not particularly functional, but neatly done https://nova.laravel.com They have a beautiful, but rigidly set strutkrua, you can not create castmon interfaces, stylize them. Just do CRUD and that's it. And it's paid https://filamentphp.com/ Analog to Nova, with essentially the same problems. For node.js: https://adminjs.co Nice promo, and the demo is way behind As standalone dashboards: https://strapi.io/ Very cool, but for other purposes. It's more of an entity builder with an interface and API https://pocketbase.io/ Similarly, it's an entity builder with an interface and API https://directus.io/ This is a backend builder. https://filamentphp.com/It is purely for php, you can't customize styles, you can't create your own interfaces. It is possible to create only tables and forms by template, and we remember that we want flexibility, independence from the language and the ability to create their own interfaces and customize them https://flatlogic.com This is also more of a backend builder. Direct competitors: https://github.com/refinedev/refine https://marmelab.com/react-admin/is probably the best solution that is currently on the market, they have been developing for a long time, they are our favorite. To the disadvantages we considered the following points: quite an old project, and somewhere the technology is already outdated, unsympathetic interface, old UI libraries. Huge documentation, it’s simply to create CRUD but hard to work without immersion. After all this there is only one conclusion: you need to do it yourself....