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PatternFly – a web UI framework by RedHat

151 points by 1023bytes 8y ago

eropple 8y ago
I've never seen this before, but it looks kind of neat. Right now I use Material UI for React stuff, and it works well enough, but I picked it mostly because I think its API is cleaner than the other frameworks I've worked with. I see that PatternFly has a React library; can anyone speak to how it is to use?
rwmj 8y ago
I've had PatternFly on my to-do list to investigate a bit more for a while. However I'm at a loss, after reading the website, to understand what it is. Is it a set of styles? Design guidelines? Code for widgets? (Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat, but doing low-level stuff)
- drivingmenuts 8y ago
  At it's core, it's apparently just Bootstrap, an HTML/CSS/JS library. The React version is a whole JS front-end framework. I'd rather it was built around Bootstrap 4, but I didn't write it, can't be too choosy.
- lima 8y ago
  It's multiple things: - the pattern library, a set of design guidelines (http://www.patternfly.org http://www.patternfly.org) - Patternfly Core, the HTML+CSS implementations (Bootstrap-based) - Framework integrations for React, Angular 1 and Angular-NG. They're currently working on pf-next, which will no longer be based on Bootstrap and feature a new design. (Disclaimer: not affiliated with Red Hat)
Annatar 8y ago
redhat finally went where it truly belongs since decades ago: web rather than OS implementation. Now, if they would so kind as to exit OS design and implementation, stage right, that would be awesome. The faster the better.
- prlin 8y ago
  What’s wrong with Redhat Linux?
  - jitl 8y ago
    Perhaps Systemd? RedHat kinda forced it on the rest of the ecosystem from their position of power in the distro world. (I don’t hold such a grievance myself, but have seen enough systemd hate to understand the position)
    - lima 8y ago
      This isn't getting more true each time it's mentioned. They did not force it on anyone, other distros adopted it.
  - Annatar 8y ago
    redhat couldn't engineer an operating system to save their life: systemd is a Windows-like system, they constantly break backwards compatibility, their compiler is purposely castrated to only produce 64-bit code, memory overcommit is still a thing and ships out of the box turned on, they can't get NFS to work correctly and haven't been able to for decades, they can't get fiberchannel to work correctly, they resisted and sabotaged XFS for decades only to now make it a default after having made their customers to suffer with ext2, 3, and 4 for twenty years, they resist ZFS, they've allowed netstat to be deprecated in favor of ss, both GFS and GFS 2 are disasters which they could never get to work correctly, Puppet is a disaster, Saltstack is a disaster, Cobbler is a disaster, Satellite / Spacewalk is a disaster... seriously, what can redhat do correctly? They spend more time arguing with paying customers on bugzilla.redhat.com than fixing their code because it's easier to argue than to find out where the problem is, or to solve the problem properly.
    - thefuzzy 8y ago
      I'm with you. Red Hat is trying to stay relevant, but it seems that their management has no idea what is going on...or what to do outside of RHEL.
est 8y ago
If you are into bootstrap, https://bulma.io/ https://bulma.io/ is also worth checkout
- thestepafter 8y ago
  I highly recommend TailwindCSS as well. Spend an hour with it and you will see significant improvements to the time it takes writing HTML and CSS.
  - pknopf 8y ago
    Wow, that is an interesting approach they got there. The Bootstrap/Foundation abstractions are rarely "just right", always requiring you to change/fork/deviate from the norm. I like the idea of building the abstractions myself, exactly as I need them. Thanks for sharing!
- notaspider 8y ago
  I've moved from bootstrap to spectre https://github.com/picturepan2/spectre https://github.com/picturepan2/spectre
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
thefuzzy 8y ago
I've tried to use PatteryFly a few times, it's actually a pretty terrible system. the biggest drawback is the lack of documentation...as you click through what they call documentation it's full of missing content and 404's. Personally, it's just better to use adminLTE or Twitter Bootstrap. With the exception of RHEL, it's just like most of Red Hat's products...purchased from someone else, half-baked, and a rather pathetic attempt to stay relevant. It seems that the only support is from internal RH devs and if you look at a lot of Red Hat's other products, even they can't really figure out how to use it (see ManageIQ).
- lima 8y ago
  > It seems that the only support is from internal RH devs That's because it's an internal RH framework. Red Hat happens to open source most of their stuff, so they put some effort into marketing PatternFly, but it's still mostly used by themselves. That being said, the people on their Slack channel are extremely helpful!
solarkraft 8y ago
What has caused the sudden spike of Web UI frameworks?
- ttul 8y ago
  RedHat lives and dies on value to the enterprise. Their consultants need to find a way to stop enterprise customers from just reaching for whatever FOSS is out there. By giving away their own framework, they can keep their clients in the redhat universe where redhat folks have expertise to offer.
  - robszumski 8y ago
    PatternFly isn't particularly new (commits back to 2014) and is mostly focused on shipping coherent and consistent product UIs from RedHat to their customers. This has nothing to do with consultants and Red Hat is not telling their customers to use this framework, although they definitely could if they desired to.
  - jacques_chester 8y ago
    I don't think this is true at all. Red Hat needed a web toolkit for their products and presumably decided that the available options weren't suitable for their purposes. These are more common now because a few years ago a lot of folks drew the same conclusions at around the same time. For example, PivotalUI[0] was developed in-house to provide a uniform toolkit and look-n-feel for Pivotal's various web interfaces (Pivotal Network, OpsMan, AppsMan, Healthcheck, Metrics etc). Other examples include JetBrains's RingUI[1] or Microsoft's ReactXP[2]. But by no means is PivotalUI intended to lock anyone into anything. To my knowledge our consulting division, Pivotal Labs, has undertaken approximately zero projects using Pivotal UI. Disclosure: I work for Pivotal. We compete with Red Hat. [0] https://styleguide.pivotal.io/ https://styleguide.pivotal.io/ [1] https://www.jetbrains.org/ring-ui/index.html https://www.jetbrains.org/ring-ui/index.html [2] https://microsoft.github.io/reactxp/ https://microsoft.github.io/reactxp/
    - AlphaSite 8y ago
      VMware has something similar in clarity[0], and I guess they decided that bootstrap in a mobile first framework and what they wanted was desktop first, since that what their customers use. I guess what matters more than reactive are wizards, login screens and tables[1]. Incidentally whoever made these examples appears to love pokemon. [0] https://github.com/vmware/clarity https://github.com/vmware/clarity [1] https://imgur.com/a/5j4PaIR https://imgur.com/a/5j4PaIR
ggreer 8y ago
I work at Red Hat (part of the CoreOS acquisition) and I have to say that PatternFly has not been useful to the project I work on.[1] First, PatternFly is big. We were mandated to adopt it, and it tripled our CSS (from 45kB to 145kB). PatternFly also bundles Open Sans web fonts, which (depending on font format) add another 200kB to 4MB to the initial page load.[2] Second, development is slow. There's a rewrite of PatternFly in the works, and its roadmap predicts a 1.0 release after April of 2019.[3] It's a CSS framework! How can it take over a year to make?! There will be two major releases of React in the same time. Speaking of React... PatternFly-React has similar shortcomings. Their babel setup doesn't seem to support tree shaking, so if you use any PF-React component you'll have to bundle 2MB of JS. The speed and quality of development leaves much to be desired. For example: It took them five months to merge a TTY component.[4] We wrote a similar component in two days.[5] 1. https://github.com/openshift/console https://github.com/openshift/console 2. https://github.com/openshift/console/pull/3 https://github.com/openshift/console/pull/3 3. https://github.com/patternfly/patternfly-next/milestones?direction=asc&sort=title https://github.com/patternfly/patternfly-next/milestones?dir... 4. https://github.com/patternfly/patternfly-react/pull/160 https://github.com/patternfly/patternfly-react/pull/160 5. https://github.com/openshift/console/pull/34 https://github.com/openshift/console/pull/34
- cmpb 8y ago
  Thanks for your insight. That’s pretty much what I was expecting in a web framework produced by Red Hat. (Not to completely disparage Red Hat - they do have some good stuff.) How’s the CoreOS transition going? My buddy worked for CoreOS and it seems like he’s incredibly busy now. It’s upsetting to hear that they’re forcing shitty tech on y’all.
- theyinwhy 8y ago
  First, cograts on your work and your deal with red hat! Second: Did you use any other css framework in the project before? If so, which one? What are the differences / your resume? Third: How is working under red hat umbrella? I hope for using patternfly you at least force them to dump project atomic in favor of container linux ;)
  - 8y ago
aphextron 8y ago
The problem with all these frameworks is you end up with a huge mess of markup unrelated to your application, and then have to have another tab open the entire time with documentation making sure you spell every class name right and dont miss a single <div> tag. Native web components with shadow DOM styling are the way to go forward IMO. Otherwise stuff like this leads to namespace issues and horrible regressions caused when the inevitable need to override something occurs and your only option is to !important a property.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Native web components with shadow DOM styling are the way to go forward IMO Frameworks like React and Angular are 10x more popular than "native web components". So if "having to have another tab open the entire time with documentation making sure you spell every class name right and dont miss a single <div> tag" is your concern, it's misplaced. People will be more familiar with those others than with native web components.
la6470 8y ago
YAUF Yet another UI f.......ramework!!

151 points by 1023bytes 8y ago

I've never seen this before, but it looks kind of neat. Right now I use Material UI for React stuff, and it works well enough, but I picked it mostly because I think its API is cleaner than the other frameworks I've worked with. I see that PatternFly has a React library; can anyone speak to how it is to use?

rwmj 8y ago

I've had PatternFly on my to-do list to investigate a bit more for a while. However I'm at a loss, after reading the website, to understand what it is. Is it a set of styles? Design guidelines? Code for widgets? (Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat, but doing low-level stuff)

drivingmenuts 8y ago
At it's core, it's apparently just Bootstrap, an HTML/CSS/JS library. The React version is a whole JS front-end framework. I'd rather it was built around Bootstrap 4, but I didn't write it, can't be too choosy.
lima 8y ago
It's multiple things: - the pattern library, a set of design guidelines (http://www.patternfly.org http://www.patternfly.org) - Patternfly Core, the HTML+CSS implementations (Bootstrap-based) - Framework integrations for React, Angular 1 and Angular-NG. They're currently working on pf-next, which will no longer be based on Bootstrap and feature a new design. (Disclaimer: not affiliated with Red Hat)

Annatar 8y ago

redhat finally went where it truly belongs since decades ago: web rather than OS implementation. Now, if they would so kind as to exit OS design and implementation, stage right, that would be awesome. The faster the better.

prlin 8y ago
What’s wrong with Redhat Linux?
- jitl 8y ago
  Perhaps Systemd? RedHat kinda forced it on the rest of the ecosystem from their position of power in the distro world. (I don’t hold such a grievance myself, but have seen enough systemd hate to understand the position)
  - lima 8y ago
    This isn't getting more true each time it's mentioned. They did not force it on anyone, other distros adopted it.
- Annatar 8y ago
  redhat couldn't engineer an operating system to save their life: systemd is a Windows-like system, they constantly break backwards compatibility, their compiler is purposely castrated to only produce 64-bit code, memory overcommit is still a thing and ships out of the box turned on, they can't get NFS to work correctly and haven't been able to for decades, they can't get fiberchannel to work correctly, they resisted and sabotaged XFS for decades only to now make it a default after having made their customers to suffer with ext2, 3, and 4 for twenty years, they resist ZFS, they've allowed netstat to be deprecated in favor of ss, both GFS and GFS 2 are disasters which they could never get to work correctly, Puppet is a disaster, Saltstack is a disaster, Cobbler is a disaster, Satellite / Spacewalk is a disaster... seriously, what can redhat do correctly? They spend more time arguing with paying customers on bugzilla.redhat.com than fixing their code because it's easier to argue than to find out where the problem is, or to solve the problem properly.
  - thefuzzy 8y ago
    I'm with you. Red Hat is trying to stay relevant, but it seems that their management has no idea what is going on...or what to do outside of RHEL.

est 8y ago

If you are into bootstrap, https://bulma.io/ https://bulma.io/ is also worth checkout

thestepafter 8y ago
I highly recommend TailwindCSS as well. Spend an hour with it and you will see significant improvements to the time it takes writing HTML and CSS.
- pknopf 8y ago
  Wow, that is an interesting approach they got there. The Bootstrap/Foundation abstractions are rarely "just right", always requiring you to change/fork/deviate from the norm. I like the idea of building the abstractions myself, exactly as I need them. Thanks for sharing!
notaspider 8y ago
I've moved from bootstrap to spectre https://github.com/picturepan2/spectre https://github.com/picturepan2/spectre

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

thefuzzy 8y ago

I've tried to use PatteryFly a few times, it's actually a pretty terrible system. the biggest drawback is the lack of documentation...as you click through what they call documentation it's full of missing content and 404's. Personally, it's just better to use adminLTE or Twitter Bootstrap. With the exception of RHEL, it's just like most of Red Hat's products...purchased from someone else, half-baked, and a rather pathetic attempt to stay relevant. It seems that the only support is from internal RH devs and if you look at a lot of Red Hat's other products, even they can't really figure out how to use it (see ManageIQ).

lima 8y ago
> It seems that the only support is from internal RH devs That's because it's an internal RH framework. Red Hat happens to open source most of their stuff, so they put some effort into marketing PatternFly, but it's still mostly used by themselves. That being said, the people on their Slack channel are extremely helpful!

solarkraft 8y ago

What has caused the sudden spike of Web UI frameworks?

ttul 8y ago
RedHat lives and dies on value to the enterprise. Their consultants need to find a way to stop enterprise customers from just reaching for whatever FOSS is out there. By giving away their own framework, they can keep their clients in the redhat universe where redhat folks have expertise to offer.
- robszumski 8y ago
  PatternFly isn't particularly new (commits back to 2014) and is mostly focused on shipping coherent and consistent product UIs from RedHat to their customers. This has nothing to do with consultants and Red Hat is not telling their customers to use this framework, although they definitely could if they desired to.
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  I don't think this is true at all. Red Hat needed a web toolkit for their products and presumably decided that the available options weren't suitable for their purposes. These are more common now because a few years ago a lot of folks drew the same conclusions at around the same time. For example, PivotalUI[0] was developed in-house to provide a uniform toolkit and look-n-feel for Pivotal's various web interfaces (Pivotal Network, OpsMan, AppsMan, Healthcheck, Metrics etc). Other examples include JetBrains's RingUI[1] or Microsoft's ReactXP[2]. But by no means is PivotalUI intended to lock anyone into anything. To my knowledge our consulting division, Pivotal Labs, has undertaken approximately zero projects using Pivotal UI. Disclosure: I work for Pivotal. We compete with Red Hat. [0] https://styleguide.pivotal.io/ https://styleguide.pivotal.io/ [1] https://www.jetbrains.org/ring-ui/index.html https://www.jetbrains.org/ring-ui/index.html [2] https://microsoft.github.io/reactxp/ https://microsoft.github.io/reactxp/
  - AlphaSite 8y ago
    VMware has something similar in clarity[0], and I guess they decided that bootstrap in a mobile first framework and what they wanted was desktop first, since that what their customers use. I guess what matters more than reactive are wizards, login screens and tables[1]. Incidentally whoever made these examples appears to love pokemon. [0] https://github.com/vmware/clarity https://github.com/vmware/clarity [1] https://imgur.com/a/5j4PaIR https://imgur.com/a/5j4PaIR

ggreer 8y ago

I work at Red Hat (part of the CoreOS acquisition) and I have to say that PatternFly has not been useful to the project I work on.[1] First, PatternFly is big. We were mandated to adopt it, and it tripled our CSS (from 45kB to 145kB). PatternFly also bundles Open Sans web fonts, which (depending on font format) add another 200kB to 4MB to the initial page load.[2] Second, development is slow. There's a rewrite of PatternFly in the works, and its roadmap predicts a 1.0 release after April of 2019.[3] It's a CSS framework! How can it take over a year to make?! There will be two major releases of React in the same time. Speaking of React... PatternFly-React has similar shortcomings. Their babel setup doesn't seem to support tree shaking, so if you use any PF-React component you'll have to bundle 2MB of JS. The speed and quality of development leaves much to be desired. For example: It took them five months to merge a TTY component.[4] We wrote a similar component in two days.[5] 1. https://github.com/openshift/console https://github.com/openshift/console 2. https://github.com/openshift/console/pull/3 https://github.com/openshift/console/pull/3 3. https://github.com/patternfly/patternfly-next/milestones?direction=asc&sort=title https://github.com/patternfly/patternfly-next/milestones?dir... 4. https://github.com/patternfly/patternfly-react/pull/160 https://github.com/patternfly/patternfly-react/pull/160 5. https://github.com/openshift/console/pull/34 https://github.com/openshift/console/pull/34

cmpb 8y ago
Thanks for your insight. That’s pretty much what I was expecting in a web framework produced by Red Hat. (Not to completely disparage Red Hat - they do have some good stuff.) How’s the CoreOS transition going? My buddy worked for CoreOS and it seems like he’s incredibly busy now. It’s upsetting to hear that they’re forcing shitty tech on y’all.
theyinwhy 8y ago
First, cograts on your work and your deal with red hat! Second: Did you use any other css framework in the project before? If so, which one? What are the differences / your resume? Third: How is working under red hat umbrella? I hope for using patternfly you at least force them to dump project atomic in favor of container linux ;)
- 8y ago

aphextron 8y ago

The problem with all these frameworks is you end up with a huge mess of markup unrelated to your application, and then have to have another tab open the entire time with documentation making sure you spell every class name right and dont miss a single <div> tag. Native web components with shadow DOM styling are the way to go forward IMO. Otherwise stuff like this leads to namespace issues and horrible regressions caused when the inevitable need to override something occurs and your only option is to !important a property.

coldtea 8y ago
>Native web components with shadow DOM styling are the way to go forward IMO Frameworks like React and Angular are 10x more popular than "native web components". So if "having to have another tab open the entire time with documentation making sure you spell every class name right and dont miss a single <div> tag" is your concern, it's misplaced. People will be more familiar with those others than with native web components.

la6470 8y ago

YAUF Yet another UI f.......ramework!!