6 ms·

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.

by 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 ;)
- lima 8y ago
  > I hope for using patternfly you at least force them to dump project atomic in favor of container linux Sounds like they're planning on rebasing it on top of Fedora/RHEL, and replacing Atomic Host with it: https://coreos.com/blog/coreos-tech-to-combine-with-red-hat-openshift https://coreos.com/blog/coreos-tech-to-combine-with-red-hat-...
lima 8y ago
> tree shaking They recently migrated their repo to lerna, so this will soon be fixed and you'll be able to import single components (@patternfly-react/console etc).
underwater 8y ago
Why would you shit all over your colleagues’ work like that? An announcement post is not a place to air your grievances. I don’t even understand why you’d compare a pattern library to a rendering framework. And comparing development speed for a component in a shared library against that for a single use case is completely unfair.
- moocowtruck 8y ago
  he's not shitting on them really he's helping people so that they don't get it in their mind that redhat is the next IBM when they use some crappy bloatfest
  - yebyen 8y ago
    Whoever downvotes you probably never tried Bluemix. Just saying. (I used it once at a hackathon several years ago and it was enough to make me want to not try again. I hope their current offerings are better. At the time, they had some utility which was supposed to compete approximately with Heroku workflow, and it was bad enough in the first 6 hours of the hackathon that we wound up spending an hour or more switching to Heroku instead of trying to figure it out.) Git receive hooks were straight up broken, I had to wonder if anyone internally was even using the product, and there was no indication that it was in beta. The hackathon was sponsored by IBM and the gentleman who was on-site to rep the line was not very interested in our problems working with the platform, only seemed to note that we didn't try more of the whiz-bang AI and NLP features that could have helped the core functionality we were trying to build. I wish I had told him that what we needed firstly, was four walls and a roof. I've had some better interactions with IBM Cloud team members at conferences since then, so it's fair to take my criticism with a grain of salt.
- teyc 8y ago
  As this is a free giveaway from Red Hat and they don't derive any revenue from it, it's better people are aware of its design choices and limitations before diving into it and walking away disatisfied.
- JohnnyConatus 8y ago
tnolet 8y ago
Out on a limb here, but have you vented this in a constructive way to your (new) coworkers? Splashing your discontent here is very enlightning for people not at RedHat, but maybe not the best way to move things forward. Complaining rarely is.
matte_black 8y ago
I appreciate the honesty, I was looking at this a bit seriously for a new project but now I think I’ll pass.
- lima 8y ago
  I'm not a Red Hat employee (though mostly working within the ecosystem), and I'm going to use PatternFly for an upcoming commercial project. I also noticed that some PRs take a long time to merge, mostly due to there being a lot of review comments and fixes. For each PR that touches CSS/HTML, they also have a designer check for accessibility and usability issues. It's a feature, not a bug ;-) The reason I like PatternFly is their emphasis on usability. I work on enterprise software, and people are going to rely on it for their day-to-day work. Most CSS frameworks are really fancy, but bad for usability (lots of white space, low contrast, hard to navigate using a keyboard). PatternFly is the opposite. Here's the React storybook, for a quick overview: (React is what most RH products seem to use nowadays) https://rawgit.com/patternfly/patternfly-react/gh-pages/index.html https://rawgit.com/patternfly/patternfly-react/gh-pages/inde...
  - matte_black 8y ago
    What you are referring to is exactly why I wanted to use it, I’d like a good framework for enterprise apps. Most of the fancy CSS frameworks you see are for consumer apps.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >I’d like a good framework for enterprise apps. Most of the fancy CSS frameworks you see are for consumer apps. And there's a difference?
      - matte_black 8y ago
        A massive difference. Enterprise apps are all about getting as much information on screen as possible with clear boundaries between different elements and relationships. No optimistic actions either.
Ari_Ugwu 8y ago
I've used Patternfly for rapid prototyping for the last 1-2 years. I share all of your frustrations. What makes Patternfly stand out for me is that incorporates opinions from enterprise dashboards/line of business apps. If it stays true to this and solves all of it's project management and code quality issues it could leap ahead of most other frameworks. I need whiz bang examples of composed components almost more than I need the component library itself. As a back end developer here is the work flow that is eased by a library like Patternfly: 1) Someone develops or exposes an API. 2) A team wants to dog food a potential new solution built on top of that API and shop it around. 3) Someone gifts them a single developer and a bucket of hours to see what they can do. In this instance I need a stable library that looks good and doesn't require me to wade through the front end too much. Patternfly fit that niche for awhile. However do to the slow dev cycles I've moved to Semantic UI and I'm just building my own component library out of that. Arguably the route I should have taken from the start but Patternfly let me ship stuff I wouldn't have otherwise in the time I was allowed. </ramble>

by ggreer 8y ago

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 ;)

lima 8y ago
> I hope for using patternfly you at least force them to dump project atomic in favor of container linux Sounds like they're planning on rebasing it on top of Fedora/RHEL, and replacing Atomic Host with it: https://coreos.com/blog/coreos-tech-to-combine-with-red-hat-openshift https://coreos.com/blog/coreos-tech-to-combine-with-red-hat-...

lima 8y ago

> tree shaking They recently migrated their repo to lerna, so this will soon be fixed and you'll be able to import single components (@patternfly-react/console etc).

underwater 8y ago

Why would you shit all over your colleagues’ work like that? An announcement post is not a place to air your grievances. I don’t even understand why you’d compare a pattern library to a rendering framework. And comparing development speed for a component in a shared library against that for a single use case is completely unfair.

moocowtruck 8y ago
he's not shitting on them really he's helping people so that they don't get it in their mind that redhat is the next IBM when they use some crappy bloatfest
- yebyen 8y ago
  Whoever downvotes you probably never tried Bluemix. Just saying. (I used it once at a hackathon several years ago and it was enough to make me want to not try again. I hope their current offerings are better. At the time, they had some utility which was supposed to compete approximately with Heroku workflow, and it was bad enough in the first 6 hours of the hackathon that we wound up spending an hour or more switching to Heroku instead of trying to figure it out.) Git receive hooks were straight up broken, I had to wonder if anyone internally was even using the product, and there was no indication that it was in beta. The hackathon was sponsored by IBM and the gentleman who was on-site to rep the line was not very interested in our problems working with the platform, only seemed to note that we didn't try more of the whiz-bang AI and NLP features that could have helped the core functionality we were trying to build. I wish I had told him that what we needed firstly, was four walls and a roof. I've had some better interactions with IBM Cloud team members at conferences since then, so it's fair to take my criticism with a grain of salt.
teyc 8y ago
As this is a free giveaway from Red Hat and they don't derive any revenue from it, it's better people are aware of its design choices and limitations before diving into it and walking away disatisfied.
JohnnyConatus 8y ago

tnolet 8y ago

Out on a limb here, but have you vented this in a constructive way to your (new) coworkers? Splashing your discontent here is very enlightning for people not at RedHat, but maybe not the best way to move things forward. Complaining rarely is.

matte_black 8y ago

I appreciate the honesty, I was looking at this a bit seriously for a new project but now I think I’ll pass.

lima 8y ago
I'm not a Red Hat employee (though mostly working within the ecosystem), and I'm going to use PatternFly for an upcoming commercial project. I also noticed that some PRs take a long time to merge, mostly due to there being a lot of review comments and fixes. For each PR that touches CSS/HTML, they also have a designer check for accessibility and usability issues. It's a feature, not a bug ;-) The reason I like PatternFly is their emphasis on usability. I work on enterprise software, and people are going to rely on it for their day-to-day work. Most CSS frameworks are really fancy, but bad for usability (lots of white space, low contrast, hard to navigate using a keyboard). PatternFly is the opposite. Here's the React storybook, for a quick overview: (React is what most RH products seem to use nowadays) https://rawgit.com/patternfly/patternfly-react/gh-pages/index.html https://rawgit.com/patternfly/patternfly-react/gh-pages/inde...
- matte_black 8y ago
  What you are referring to is exactly why I wanted to use it, I’d like a good framework for enterprise apps. Most of the fancy CSS frameworks you see are for consumer apps.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >I’d like a good framework for enterprise apps. Most of the fancy CSS frameworks you see are for consumer apps. And there's a difference?
    - matte_black 8y ago
      A massive difference. Enterprise apps are all about getting as much information on screen as possible with clear boundaries between different elements and relationships. No optimistic actions either.

Ari_Ugwu 8y ago

I've used Patternfly for rapid prototyping for the last 1-2 years. I share all of your frustrations. What makes Patternfly stand out for me is that incorporates opinions from enterprise dashboards/line of business apps. If it stays true to this and solves all of it's project management and code quality issues it could leap ahead of most other frameworks. I need whiz bang examples of composed components almost more than I need the component library itself. As a back end developer here is the work flow that is eased by a library like Patternfly: 1) Someone develops or exposes an API. 2) A team wants to dog food a potential new solution built on top of that API and shop it around. 3) Someone gifts them a single developer and a bucket of hours to see what they can do. In this instance I need a stable library that looks good and doesn't require me to wade through the front end too much. Patternfly fit that niche for awhile. However do to the slow dev cycles I've moved to Semantic UI and I'm just building my own component library out of that. Arguably the route I should have taken from the start but Patternfly let me ship stuff I wouldn't have otherwise in the time I was allowed. </ramble>