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My two cents: I work for a medium-sized company that has used Fabricator to build UI component libraries for clients. In each project where Fabricator was used,
by canyonero 11y ago
My two cents: I work for a medium-sized company that has used Fabricator to build UI component libraries for clients. In each project where Fabricator was used, the deliverable source code (CSS and JS) has been both messy and inconsistent. This is due to that fact that Fabricator does not assist or guide the developer when they develop CSS and JS for their modular design components. (See http://fbrctr.github.io/building-a-toolkit/assets.html http://fbrctr.github.io/building-a-toolkit/assets.html) This diminishes any ability to reuse components/widgets/atoms etc across projects.
The tool does enforce and encourage atomic design architecture when it comes to HTML. At best, I'd describe Fabricator as a static-site/documentation generator. However, I wouldn't recommend using it Fabricator to generate documentation in the 'toolkit' way that's recommended in it the docs because it tightly couples that static site/documentation generation to UI library source. There are plenty of static site generators that work well for generating docs that I'd rather use (jekyll, hugo, etc).
I'd encourage developers considering Fabricator to proceed with caution. Although, it boasts ease of UI development based on atomic designs, the tool does not aide in code modularity or UI component re-usablity.
- rrrx3 11y agoInteresting. Looking around at the source now, it looks like it's not optimized to imply that sort of architectural thinking. That's a bummer. I'd love to have seen it take the React style approach of co-locating all the relevant parts to a module together.
- lukeaskew 11y agoCreator here. The lack of architectural direction is very much intentional. I'm a strong believer that those decisions will vary from project to project and developer to developer. My goal was to provide the least obtrusive set of tools as possible. I do have some plans to create a boilerplate toolkit that includes some of the architectural patterns I use often. Hopefully that helps guide developers who are less experienced with building large modular systems.