Comment by claytongulick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by claytongulick | Hacker News Reader

This seems spectacular, and I already would have added my CC and purchased a subscription, except for two major things:

1) I don't use react, I use web components. This product seems very React centric, which kills it for use for a lot of people

2) It's not helpful to me to be limited to the Chakra UI design system, in order for this to be useful for my teams, I'd need to be able to add our web component design system. I assume there would be some sort of "mapping" process where I could indicate "this is a header component" and "this is a sidebar" component, etc...

The absolute killer feature would be to allow me (storybook style) to add any web component and place it on the screen. I've been searching for a visual designer like this forever, it seems like the obvious solution with web components, but I still haven't found it.

Thanks for the feedback! This is super valuable.

1. There isn't anything fundamental about that tool that requires React. We have a lot of React experience and it's a very popular framework, so it made sense for us as a place to start, but we can definitely consider supporting other options.

2. Absolutely! We have a first draft of our mapping protocol already that works reasonably well, but still needs more iteration before we open things up. It supports a custom hook for attaching things to the DOM, so shouldn't require React specifically either.

Can you share a little about how you use web components, so we can better understand what an integration should look like? Do you use any kind of JS framework (at build time or runtime)? Do you use JSX, or is it all vanilla HTML?

Pretty much vanilla, but it depends on the component.

For components that need reactivity and have frequent renders, I use lit-html for rendering on a property setter change.

I mix and match components from different frameworks, I use vaadin-router, but sometimes include lightweight components from other systems too (ionic, shoelace, mwc, etc...).

Mostly though, it's just light-dom vanilla Web components with bootstrap (or similar) for base styles.

Got it! Thanks for the info, it's very useful to understand the workflow.

Amazing. I was about to write literally the same. Stick to web components and plain JS. Add some small routing library of your own if needed and ability to import web components.

Basically look at what Delphi / Lazarus / MS .NET Form Designers do and replicate best parts of it.

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