vitro VS shoelace-css

check out this one https://github.com/remorses/vitro

I’ve used storybook for 4 years in teams of 1-15 devs and I’d say it’s a must have for any serious react app with 3+ full time developers. It has its rough edges sure but the ROI is 10x nonetheless in my experiences.

Advantages

- Testing components in isolation forces some good practices and allows to keep the codebase in check by encouraging good practices (limited coupling of unrelated parts of the codebase

- It’s super productive because it is both a form of unit tests, useful during development of UX in « TDD mode », and a very good documentation of your UI components. It greatly reduces the effort needed for both these aspects.

- For DX, the hot reload is generally faster in storybook than in the App (except if you use vite/snowpack in your app, so far..) because reloading a single component is faster than reloading the whole app and its state. In a large CRA our hot reload could sometimes take up 1min in complex cases, while storybook was taking 3s.

- Coupled with Chromatic (their hosted platform) and its GitHub integration it makes QA and visual regression testing a joy, 10x faster than alternatives, I really recommend that.

- It allows to share/iterate easily your ongoing developments with non-tech people in your organisation at early stage. A very good bridge between Figma and the final UI. A good support during Daily meetings about UI, just shared the deployed story url to ask for feedback.

Drawbacks

- It has its own Webpack config. So if you have a custom Webpack config in your app (don’t do that anyway, unless absolutely necessary) then be prepared to duplicate the customizations in your storybook config

- Global React Contexts needs to be duplicated in your storybook config and, if necessary, configured for individual stories. For example if your signup button changes based on an Auth status stored in a global context, then you will have to use Story.parameters to customize the content of the Auth context.

- We had a couple instances where storybook was the limiting factor for us to embrace some new/fancy tech, like yarn v2 or service worker. However maybe that’s a good litmus test: things that storybook support are state of the art JS and generally safe to use. Things that storybook does not support out of the box will cause you problems with other tools anyway: if it’s not storybook, some other tool like Cypress, Jest, Next, or some browsers will cause you trouble with your “shiny new tech”

- It can be slow to startup. We had a storybook with 300+ complex stories and it took 5min to startup and 10min to build in the CI

- It had some API changes/ migration pains a couple years back. However I think the new API is very good and will last a long time so this is behind.

Overall I definitely advocate to use storybook, especially with Chromatic, the ROI is 10x. If you find yourself limited by it in 2021 despite configuring it, maybe question your own tech stack.

Don’t try to implement your own storybook copycat (we had a colleague develop an alternative https://github.com/remorses/vitro , but i think it was not worth the effort)

If you want to see a state of the art repo in NextJS that uses storybook extensively with some customizations, check https://github.com/Labelflow/labelflow/

HTMX gets all the hype right now, but there are other tools in the same vain, my favorite being Unpoly (https://unpoly.com). Together with Shoelace (https://shoelace.style) you get nice GUIs real fast, without the burden of complicated dependency management and build steps. Also, you don't have to write a lot of JS, just what is needed for small enhancements, as it was meant to be. Some might say the main drawback is the tight coupling to your backend. In my case, this is also the main benefit as it integrates perfectly with the backend framework (Django).

Hello HN,

I'm releasing Hyperdiv (https://hyperdiv.io), a framework for rapidly developing reactive browser UIs in Python, with immediate-mode syntax and using Shoelace (https://shoelace.style) as its built-in component system.

This short coding video will give you a good idea of what it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XJKfxaqvGE

I wrote a brief article about the motivation and approach: https://hyperdiv.io/intro.html

Hyperdiv doesn't aim to compete with serious full-stack frameworks. The core aim was to make it easy and fast to prototype apps and build UI-based tools. I was originally motivated by internal tools at work -- feeling the need to quickly put together UI-based tools to share with both technical and non-technical coworkers, without having to stand up and maintain a full internal stack.

This is my first major open source release. I really appreciate your feedback and support. - Marius

For example, all the following design systems can be used without tooling (some of them provide ready-to-use bundles, others can be used through import maps): Google's Material Web, Microsoft's Fluent UI, IBM's Carbon, Adobe's Spectrum, Nordhealth's Nord, Shoelace, etc.

Here's what this looks like - note that I'm using Shoelace components for styling purposes.

There are lots of open-source design systems built with Lit. Shoelace is a popular component set that you might check out: https://github.com/shoelace-style/shoelace There are many others...

Would it help if we listed more open source projects on our site?

Because of our focus on components and the fact that you really can use just about any libraries and scaffolding for apps, we don't really have an app starter kit, but it's something we've talked about.

I'm really excited about all this, and it makes me have some faith in the web again. I think that Lit is a step in the right direction especially the ability to do SSR / SSG and hydrate a web page. Hopefully 🤞 Shoelace can get SSR running, which is currently one hurdle, but I think it is achievable.