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Utopia, a visual design tool for React, with code as the source of truth

utopia.app

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Re: Utopia, a visual design tool for React, with code as the source of truth

#31

Post by rho4 »

dvt wrote: post #23

25 years later, and we're back to FrontPage. "Time is a flat circle."

I'm getting old, too *sigh.

Technology stacks appear, and go right ahead reinventing dependency managers and repositories, IDEs with autocompletion, refactoring & WYSIWYG editors, a strong type system, comments and schema validation for configuration file formats (JSON)...

Nice work though, looks really promising!

Re: Utopia, a visual design tool for React, with code as the source of truth

#33

Post by 123jay7 »

krmmalik wrote: post #19

I am very interested in this. I am a low-coder you could say. I have to start coding a front-end in React soon (and I have yet to learn React) so with all the overhead of learning React as well as fiddling with html, css etc, it feels like a really big task. I saw some visual builders for React , downloaded/tried a couple but they had pretty big learning curves of their own so I didn't bother taking it any further. Y…

If you are learning, you should stay far away from "visual builders". Unfortunately, these things will make you learn slower because they often prioritize visual design over sound, structural code. Learn the basics first. If you want to learn React, just download it, read the official docs and use `create-react-app`.

Re: Utopia, a visual design tool for React, with code as the source of truth

#37

Post by phist_mcgee »

dvt wrote: post #30
canada_dry wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 25 years later, and we're back to FrontPage. And... about bloody time IMHO. There's a reason tools like FrontPage and Flash were so popular - those tools made the internet available to millions of people who aren't into tedious coding.

I totally agree. I'm not sure why they fell out of popularity. I would've never learned HTML/CSS/JS had it not been for my 9-year-old self messing with FrontPage.

They fell out of favour because you couldn't realistically build a dynamic site that didn't generate spaghetti code. They were fine for static sites, but the moment you needed to make things _happen_ they become unmaintainable, unversioned messes.

Re: Utopia, a visual design tool for React, with code as the source of truth

#38

Post by e12e »

dvt wrote: post #23

25 years later, and we're back to FrontPage. "Time is a flat circle."

I can't recall front-page doing script/interactivity much? This is more like Dreamweaver?

Ed: it's strange that the lively-kernel.org approach (the Self/Smalltalk approach) never did seem to gain any real traction. Rather we get these odd half-meassures like source-maps, bundled js and what-not.

Well, any small progress towards the 80s in the 20s is good i guess...

Re: Utopia, a visual design tool for React, with code as the source of truth

#39

Post by jimsmart »

Aeolun wrote: post #28
tmp_anon_22 wrote: post #22

Wouldn't this be better as a VS code plugin versus a web-based tool?

Or a full electron app. Not sure I like the idea of uploading my code to test.

It seems to be open source - one might imagine it can be run as a local instance?

Re: Utopia, a visual design tool for React, with code as the source of truth

#40

Post by mrkoreye »

Very cool! Using “follow me” mode is a neat way to see what you are editing in both the code and in the visual design.

We are working on something similar at Builder.io that utilizes jsx-lite to allow visual editing right alongside code. Feel free to check it out here: https://jsx-lite.builder.io/?outputTab=react

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