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I have a soft spot for metaframeworks, you know. So I eagerly dig into info related to any metaframework projects and tools. There's no shortage of that these days, of course — the landscape is versatile. But some projects are quite esoteric and hidden from external eyes — either because of geographical and cultural reasons, or because of language barriers. Here it is both. UmiJS and tools around that are developed predominantly by the Chinese community of commercial and non-commercial open-source contributors. However, as with many Chinese technological innovations (looking at you DeepSeek), this one sparks curiosity because of how rich and self-sufficient the ecosystem is. So armed with this curiosity and intrigued by the original GitHub source code findings, I had decided to explore it further. Consider it a kind of "Umi for React/Vue/Angular/Svelte developers" research, often resting on the corresponding habitual analogies.
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SurveyJS
JavaScript Form Builder with No-Code UI & Built-In JSON Schema Editor. Keep full control over the data you collect and tailor the form builder’s entire look and feel to your users’ needs. SurveyJS works with React, Angular, Vue 3, and is compatible with any backend or auth system. Learn more.
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Not surprisingly, the Umi organisation on GitHub even has a repository for some AI tool which, I'd assume, will be analogous to Vercel's AI SDK.
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I stumbled upon UmiJS accidentally when reading about Mako — a Vite analog built with Rust (of course) which I'm very interested in. When I started to dig, I had fallen into a whole treasure trove which I wanted to share with other people who hadn't heard anything about the Umi ecosystem. Maybe it's just me living under a stone, so feel free to skip it if you're already a UmiJS kung fu master. Otherwise, welcome to the ride.
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awesome-javascript
🐢 A collection of awesome browser-side JavaScript libraries, resources and shiny things.
The father of UmiJS and many other tools I mentioned is Chen Cheng, the person leading the Ant Group's front-end work. They're a very productive and insightful person and open-source enthusiast, to the point of curating one of the most popular JS awesome lists — Awesome JavaScript. I would follow their blog or anything willingly but looks like everything they write is behind some esoteric type of a popular Chinese paywall service so I had left my attempts. Their and their team's repositories are quite popular, especially among the Chinese audience (which is fair).
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The code for the described project can be found here. Umi suggests (and supports) quite a bunch of build tools and package managers, but the default one is pnpm, for which you'll need to have Node.js v18+ installed.
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something very opposite to tools like, for instance Waku, if you will
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I stumbled upon UmiJS accidentally when reading about Mako — a Vite analog built with Rust (of course) which I'm very interested in. When I started to dig, I had fallen into a whole treasure trove which I wanted to share with other people who hadn't heard anything about the Umi ecosystem. Maybe it's just me living under a stone, so feel free to skip it if you're already a UmiJS kung fu master. Otherwise, welcome to the ride.
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InfluxDB
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
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of course
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storybook
Storybook is the industry standard workshop for building, documenting, and testing UI components in isolation
Dumi. A static site generator specifically designed for component library development. Look at it as something between Storybook and Docusaurus inside the Umi world (but much better integrated between each other, presumably).
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🧙 In general, UmiJS provides developers with a clever Angular/RedwoodJS-like approach with out-of-the-box tools and scripts for streamlined web development in big teams. The corresponding inevitably huge amount of abstractions and hidden complexity brings a decent level of obscurity and magic, which might be good or bad, depending on the number of dedicated wizards of high level in your team.
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Dva. A plugin-based state management solution (Redux + Sagas). Also quite popular in narrow communities outside of the Umi world.
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Dva. A plugin-based state management solution (Redux + Sagas). Also quite popular in narrow communities outside of the Umi world.
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Qiankun.
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The code for the described project can be found here. Umi suggests (and supports) quite a bunch of build tools and package managers, but the default one is pnpm, for which you'll need to have Node.js v18+ installed.
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nx
An AI-first build platform that connects everything from your editor to CI. Helping you deliver fast, without breaking things.
🏗️ The Umi's plugin system and API is quite interesting. You can do a lot with that. The approach is quite common for dev tools and in this case resembles both Vite and Nx with their extensibility and community orientation. There's a huge ecosystem of plugins of all sorts, and you can always complement them with your own (which is quite important for sophisticated enterprise development). I'd assume you could build pretty decent metaframework mechanisms with this flexible approach. At least, as I mentioned already, you have a bunch of thoughtful building blocks for that.
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🎨 LESS is recommended by the Umi team officially as a styles preprocessor which is a bit weird and original. I didn't see it often (never, actually) in other tools (which doesn't lessen LESS's awesomeness, of course) and it creates some vibe of exclusivity and rebellion (as everything in Umi, TBH).
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Dumi. A static site generator specifically designed for component library development. Look at it as something between Storybook and Docusaurus inside the Umi world (but much better integrated between each other, presumably).
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💚 You can use Vue instead of React (via a dedicated configuration) even though the app becomes quite a contraption in this case. Vue is quite loved in the oriental web development tradition so it's not a surprise, and I'm really glad that, as opposed to many other metaframeworks, here you can have options, similar to the loved and only Astro.
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UmiJS is an [extremely] pluggable enterprise-scale React-based web application [meta]framework, offering (as many analogs) routing, build tools, dedicated design system, and everything in between. From what I could see during my reconnaissance, its main market is huge enterprise monorepos for React websites and web applications (something very opposite to tools like, for instance Waku, if you will). Umi itself is not exactly a metaframework though, as I'd say, but rather something React would be if it aimed to resemble Angular as of version 19 — the powerful SPA framework with optional support for SSR/SSG and a whole lot of build options making it very customizable and approachable for performance optimizations specific to each particular use case. Its plugins-driven extensibility is something resembling Vite but for a more dedicated goal of building rich user interfaces. And there's more.
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Stream
Stream - Scalable APIs for Chat, Feeds, Moderation, & Video. Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
