I am involved in a project that several people working on a react native project.
I need to find a way to separate the styling tasks form code, in a way that UI develop can work without the need of code developer (from my point of view, a style is a person who define the structure of UI, place components on screen and also define their color and visual representation).
my questions are:
Is there any tools that the style developer can use to create styles and export suitable files for inclusion to project?
How can I make sure that the two team work without duplicating their work by other team? I came from a WPF and Web development, and in that systems, there is a good separation between the UI and codes. For example, In MVVM, the only agreement that stylist and coder should have is the name of component, and the stylist can make all of the styles and coder can do all of the coding without repeating their work (I know that this is over simplified, but the concept is there and a good team can use it). In a web development, stylist create the HTML and CSS, and the coder use angolarJS or JQuery to control the component and attach to their events.
In our styling team we are using skitch, can this tool generate suitable style code for react native? If yes, what would be the workflow?
Any other suggestion on how best to separate styling from coding in react native.
I don't have the best answer for this question, But I can provide you some feedback & tips from my experience.
For separating UI & Business code like in MVVM, you can separate the classes as
Container class (handles all business logic) and
View class (Only responsible for presentation) with styles defined as a separate class that can make use of some universal theme provider
There can be multiple view classes (iOs, Android , if possible Web) but all them will use the main container class for business logic (REfer 1st link for more details)
Refer:
https://blog.cloudboost.io/react-native-a-deep-dive-part-1-5a982f847d20
https://medium.com/#dan_abramov/smart-and-dumb-components-7ca2f9a7c7d0
For styling you can opt for some Theme Provider classes that will hold universal themes as an object. The coder can use these styles in the components. The main theme will be defined in the root class with the provider. If you are carefully reusing these styles, you only need to update the styles in one place updating all of them. Also there is support for dark & light themes.
Refer:
https://github.com/callstack/react-native-paper
https://github.com/xinthink/react-native-material-kit
https://github.com/xotahal/react-native-material-ui
Related
After clicking on the Set tag/status on left, I want to open a card like this on the right.
What is the good solution for it in React? Regular CSS or material ui or react-bootstrap will be fine.
it is a nice question but depends on how much time you have and how much determinate you are.
Showing some solutions related about you asked.
Regular CSS
You will need to use Javascript to support you on the hide/show logic using CSS and JS tricks and proprieties.
It is more complicated because there is no pattern until you create yours or use someone's but on the other hand you can practice more Vanilla JS and improve your CSS skills.
Material UI
It is a good option if you want to use robust components to support you with customization and style patterns.
It has a learning scale to make the usage easier but after that it has a good flow to use its components and customize them.
Some tips if you choose Material UI, use its theme override to put your own theme into all Material UI stuff using the lib styled-components and try not to customize all components using only CSS, use props following the docs, it will be scalable.
react-bootstrap
If you are used to use bootstrap with HTML, CSS and JS I do recomend to use it because it will be faster to you to build it, but if not I recommend you to go with Material UI.
But why Material UI and not react-bootstrap, because if you have never worked with anyone so learning about Material UI using React you be more advantageous considering that its components are good to use and on almost every case them solve the problem.
Final
These are what I think about those options you gave.
I really like Material UI and what they build, the components are so easy to understand and customize using those props or classes. The lib has some integrations and tools to help on style guide creation using override patterns.
If you have never tried it, I recommend you to do that and use that.
I'm confused with some css templates in bootstrap.
I've been a developer for years already but I never worked in a company that let me create an entire website as front-end developer say for example an e-commerce site.
So if someone would say "do an e-commerce site", do I have to ask them for a ready made css template? If so, then is it possible there are already other sites that bought it, other than me, e.g. we may have the same web face?
I am not really an expert in css nor an artist. I have created a website for personal use but it was pure bootstrap. I can see other templates in bootstrap; they have other components manipulated, like a different menu which is not present in their list of components.
How did they do that? Is it another individual css, js, html component? Do I have to create my own component sometimes?
For you to understand me, I can create relatively easily any site written in either React or Angular but I cannot create my own css design.
The examples and templates that you see in Bootstrap uses the Bootstrap framework, but the CSS and JS design components are changed to better define what the user wants it to be like.
For example
form-group-lg select.form-control{height:46px;line-height:46px}
This is the pre-defined CSS value from Bootstrap CDN, changing this CSS value to something else, changes your design, but you still are based on Boostrap. Basically, Bootstrap is not only about design, it's following a library, a framework, a skeleton to make your web development (specially frontend) easier.
I have something on my mind for quite a while but couldn't find an answer to it. Consider the following:
You like to build a fancy website with React and have to decide which front-end framework you should use. In my example I have chosen Material-UI.
Now you came to a point where you need more features like a responsive grid system, show/hide styles etc. Instead of implementing them on your own (or copying it from bootstrap/foundation, for example) you think: 'Hey, why wouldn't I include another framework beside Material-UI'.
Now comes the question. I know that most of the css frameworks available have their own normalisation css and basic styles for typography and other elements.
Can I safely include another (more featured) css framework beside Material-UI without breaking fundamental things or should I avoid that?
Furthermore, what is a good practice approach to extend the css features without copying parts from other frameworks and without reinventing the wheel all the time. Did you ever had a case or project where you had to combine multiple front-end frameworks and how did you solve this problem?
Thanks for your feedback.
Cheers
Gregor
FYI, there's a Material Design version of Foundation, you can check it out at http://eucalyptuss.github.io/material-foundation/
Now, talking about your doubts... one should be very careful when mixing and/or using more than one framework at the same time... one issue can be conflict, other can be unnecessary bloating which could make load time heavier.
However, if you are aware of that, most of modern frameworks (as Foundation) can be compiled partially, so you will be loading only the stuff you'll use, minimizing all possible issues.
Have been thinking this exactly thing lately.. I would choose one that has most of the features i need in my project. I usually go just with Bootstrap (sass version) and use only the styling part of that (css grids mostly).
Mixing frameworks will eventually be hard to maintain and you have to include lot of extra (unused) features into your application. When using some "cool", full featured components like Material-UI has, there will still be times when some component doesn't have just the property you would need.
So my opinion is:
Use some framework for styling only. This way you have uniform look in your site. Or even just some responsive grid library could be enough.
Usually basic html components are enough to fill basic needs, you can just build your own custom components for special needs (or use some from npm library). This way you have just the features you need.
This way my site is not depending just some single framework. I can change the styling part anytime, i can change one component to another etc. without having to re-write my whole application just because it's been developed entirely with some "full featured" framework.
I am starting a developement of a big project and I need to know if to use ViewEncapsulation None or Emulated.
From some reason the default is Emulated but I noticed that Angualr2 Material uses None.
We need to have reusable widgets within the projects and have different styles and also dynamic themes.
I know it's can be done with Emulated but is seems more difficult to manage and not as simple as using CSS rules or override.
What should be the recommended mode for such a project?
The benefits of using 'Emulated' option is, that You will be able to create encapsulated components(styles, template, etc.). Also it will help You to not only create component once(dropdown, table, popup) and reuse it within your current project, but also it can be used in different projects later or being open-sourced, if You will.
The recommended way is using the Emulated option.
It will give you the ability to encapsulate your component, not only the HTML template, but also the styles.
This is the future. It is called web components and I strongly advise you to read about it. For more details, see:
Modular future web components
Shadow DOM strategies in Angular 2
I would ask if anyone has had experience in integrating a grid based CSS system (960 or similar) with a GWT uibinder application.
Our application is done with GWT 2.1, UIBinder and the latest GWT CSS capabilities, which have been really great to work with and enabled us to have a modular and flexible styling system. Our design team has returned a HTML layout with the corresponding grid css files and we are supposed to integrate them with our GWT code.
If we were to integrate the grid styles into our uibinder xml files we would have to wrap all our GWT widgets with divs with the right grid class names.
Personally I don't like the idea of mixing a completely separate grid css concern with the modular uibinder system, but I do understand the benefits the grid system can provide.
Any opinions or experiences? Pros and Cons for either approach?
We found ourselves in a similar position, having the app built around gwt, MVP and uibinder. This is great for developers, but it turned out to not be so great for designers. At the begining we gave them a html snapshot of our app + css and asked them to design it. They did't like this. It became a nightmare when customers wanted custom designs done by their designers.
The question is will simply wrapping you widgets in div be enough? Our designer provided custom buttons, tables, links, etc.. It was quite a task to force gwt widgets to look like the design.
So what we did was:
Replaced gwt-centric app design with html-centric one. This means we avoid generating html in code. We use classic html+JS+jQuery apporach, just instead of JS we have gwt and instead jQuery we use gwtQuery. We use only a few gwt widgets. Instead, in out Views we use gwtQuery to copy&expand example html that designer provided. GwtQuery can be externalized: all selectors can be put in one (or many) external interfaces, if a design changes (customers want changes or even bring in their designs) this intersection of html and gwt is all in one place.
Ditched gwt 2.2 mvp (activities, places), for our own which is a simplified version of gwt 2.1 mvp architecture. We no longer have to add 2 new classes and update others (place, tokenizer, update place factory) to have a new place.