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> you do need someone who really knows react/next ecosystem to manage the underlying integration. So this is react specific? It doesn't say so in the home page

> you do need someone who really knows react/next ecosystem to manage the underlying integration. So this is react specific? It doesn't say so in the home page. It vaguely hints at it with a "Bring your data sources, React components, deployment environments, design system, and more.".

throwup238 3y ago
That omission jumped out at me too. I immediately googled "django plasmic" and had to find out from the Github repo title: "plasmicapp/plasmic: Visual builder for React. Build apps, ..."
chungwu 3y ago
It is possible to use Plasmic in other contexts, but to really unlock the power of Plasmic, yes you need to be using React.
___victor 3y ago
While Plasmic does offer the flexibility to export designs to other frameworks like Angular, Vue or even plain HTML, it is mainly targeting React. Some features, such as the ability to register custom components from the user's codebase, are React-specific.
- octopoc 3y ago
  Is the project open to contributions for supporting other frameworks? I'm interested in Blazor specifically, which is based on HTML. Do you see this becoming a pan-framework "design mode" tool? Do you think it's architected for that? A related question is, is it easy to use it for client-side-only stuff and leave the backend alone?
  - ___victor 3y ago
    > is it easy to use it for client-side-only stuff and leave the backend alone? Yes - using Plasmic to manage landing pages design and content is our main use case! We still need to improve the experience for open source contributions, but we are open to that! That being said, React is still our main priority at the moment. I'm not familiar with Blazor, but you may also explore our render API (https://docs.plasmic.app/learn/render-api/ https://docs.plasmic.app/learn/render-api/). It allows fetching rendered HTML from Plasmic servers, then you would just render it in the DOM.
claytongulick 3y ago
This is my main concern too. I don't understand why tools like this "pick a winner" with a specific framework instead of rendering to Web Components with a framework wrapper, or using something like Stencil[1] that can render to any framework. [1] https://stenciljs.com/ https://stenciljs.com/
- ___victor 3y ago
  It really depends on how well you want the design to integrate with your codebase, which is where most of Plasmic power lies on, such as: leveraging your existing custom components as building blocks within the design tool; or adding heavier instrumentation to props and rendered contents on the code side. It is possible to use Plasmic's render API (https://docs.plasmic.app/learn/render-api/ https://docs.plasmic.app/learn/render-api/) to fetch the rendered HTML and just render your designs using any framework, but that means it's a more limited experience.
- chungwu 3y ago
  We wanted to support tight integration with people's existing codebase, so that it is easy to use your React components directly in Plasmic, or to read data from your React contexts provided from outside of Plasmic, or to have your code components communicate with each other via React contexts when they're used within Plasmic, etc. There's power in being in "one React tree" with your existing app. I imagine it's possible to achieve this with other frameworks too, though the integrations would be deep and bespoke for each framework. We've just decided to focus on React first.
  - claytongulick 3y ago
    Sure, though if you had selected Web Components as the base implementation, you could have achieved that goal while also being compatible with almost every other framework. See Ionic for a great example of this. There are several lightweight wrapper libraries to "reactify" web components. Going the other direction is not as easy. While it's possible, it involves loading all of react into another framework.

throwup238 3y ago

That omission jumped out at me too. I immediately googled "django plasmic" and had to find out from the Github repo title: "plasmicapp/plasmic: Visual builder for React. Build apps, ..."

chungwu 3y ago

It is possible to use Plasmic in other contexts, but to really unlock the power of Plasmic, yes you need to be using React.

___victor 3y ago

While Plasmic does offer the flexibility to export designs to other frameworks like Angular, Vue or even plain HTML, it is mainly targeting React. Some features, such as the ability to register custom components from the user's codebase, are React-specific.

octopoc 3y ago
Is the project open to contributions for supporting other frameworks? I'm interested in Blazor specifically, which is based on HTML. Do you see this becoming a pan-framework "design mode" tool? Do you think it's architected for that? A related question is, is it easy to use it for client-side-only stuff and leave the backend alone?
- ___victor 3y ago
  > is it easy to use it for client-side-only stuff and leave the backend alone? Yes - using Plasmic to manage landing pages design and content is our main use case! We still need to improve the experience for open source contributions, but we are open to that! That being said, React is still our main priority at the moment. I'm not familiar with Blazor, but you may also explore our render API (https://docs.plasmic.app/learn/render-api/ https://docs.plasmic.app/learn/render-api/). It allows fetching rendered HTML from Plasmic servers, then you would just render it in the DOM.

claytongulick 3y ago

This is my main concern too. I don't understand why tools like this "pick a winner" with a specific framework instead of rendering to Web Components with a framework wrapper, or using something like Stencil[1] that can render to any framework. [1] https://stenciljs.com/ https://stenciljs.com/

___victor 3y ago
It really depends on how well you want the design to integrate with your codebase, which is where most of Plasmic power lies on, such as: leveraging your existing custom components as building blocks within the design tool; or adding heavier instrumentation to props and rendered contents on the code side. It is possible to use Plasmic's render API (https://docs.plasmic.app/learn/render-api/ https://docs.plasmic.app/learn/render-api/) to fetch the rendered HTML and just render your designs using any framework, but that means it's a more limited experience.
chungwu 3y ago
We wanted to support tight integration with people's existing codebase, so that it is easy to use your React components directly in Plasmic, or to read data from your React contexts provided from outside of Plasmic, or to have your code components communicate with each other via React contexts when they're used within Plasmic, etc. There's power in being in "one React tree" with your existing app. I imagine it's possible to achieve this with other frameworks too, though the integrations would be deep and bespoke for each framework. We've just decided to focus on React first.
- claytongulick 3y ago
  Sure, though if you had selected Web Components as the base implementation, you could have achieved that goal while also being compatible with almost every other framework. See Ionic for a great example of this. There are several lightweight wrapper libraries to "reactify" web components. Going the other direction is not as easy. While it's possible, it involves loading all of react into another framework.