styled-components VS storybook

CSS-in-JS is a styling technique wherein CSS is composed using JavaScript instead of defined in external files. This method allows CSS to be scoped locally to components rather than globally, reducing the probability of style conflicts. Utilizing JavaScript also enables dynamic styling easily aligned with the component's state or props. Libraries like Styled Components and Emotion are popular choices in the React ecosystem for adopting this method.

In 2023, I had a chat with Max Stoiber, CEO of Stellate, on a podcast to learn about his early success on GitHub. His first open-source project, react-boilerplate/react-boilerplate, gained a whopping 10k stars in just one weekend after appearing on the homepage of Hacker News. This success led Max to drop out of university and create several other popular open-source projects, including styled-components. This library accelerates the process of building styles in React components.

Embracing the styled-components library allows developers to write actual CSS code to style their components. It utilizes tagged template literals to style components, enabling a seamless integration of styles within the component's JavaScript file. This approach eliminates the mapping between components and styles, thus enhancing developer productivity and component reusability.

styled-components: Allows for maintainable styling with CSS-in-JS. Learn more

Over the past few years, I've worked with React apps utilising various CSS-in-JS libraries, starting with styled-components, transitioning through emotion, Theme UI, and finally Stitches. I've also integrated MUI, Mantine, and Chakra in numerous client projects.

There are several alternatives to MUI. shadcn/ui is a modern alternative that is very popular. Ant Design is also a great alternative. Charkra UI can also be used as a UI Framework. Some people suggest just using styled components. Some use Tailwind CSS. Yet, for both styled components and Tailwind CSS, one still writes a lot of CSS. This might not provide the best developer experience compared to using a UI Framework, especially if we aim to avoid designing all the pages on the website.

Website: Styled Components

The project is build using several ready made components available within, Mantine. It’s a fully featured React components library. However some places still use some custom CSS-in-JS so we used some good ol’ styled components.

As a development server, we can use an actual development server of our app, like Create React App (that we use for the examples) or Vite, or another tool like React Styleguidist or Storybook, to test isolated components.

Source: qcatch on Feb 22, 2024 https://github.com/storybookjs/storybook/discussions/25470

[Bug]: Configuration with TailwindCss Next.js using Tailwind with Storybook

Astro has no runtime. This means no unit tests. This also means no Storybook for your Astro components (although, they’re working on it!)

If you're into UI development, then you need to know about Storybook. It's a frontend workshop for building UI components and pages in isolation. The latest version brings some big improvements for testing and documentation with built-in visual testing. There's also React Server Component support, improved controls for React and Vue projects, as well as improved Vite architecture, Vitest testing, and Vite 5 support. Check out all the major changes in the Storybook changelog.

Storybook

We are continuing to make building fullstack websites and application with Analog and Angular as seamless as possible, and extending the Angular ecosystem through integrations with Astro, Nx, [Vitest]https://analogjs.org/docs/features/testing/vitest, Storybook, and more.

Storybook is the industry standard UI tool for building, testing, and documenting components and pages. It’s used by thousands of teams globally, integrates with all major JavaScript frameworks, and combines with most leading design and developer tools.

Expo has first-class support for building full-stack websites with React, so I can leverage that to add Cypress/Playwright for E2E testing and add the Storybook for UI components.

Storybook emerges as a pioneering solution among React debugging tools, offering an interactive environment for developers to create and test UI components. With its robust platform, teams can build, organize, and design UI components, and even entire screens, without the hurdles of business logic and plumbing.