Boilerplates: Step up your Web Development Process

Janani.S -

One of the biggest challenges in web development is building a robust, fast, and scalable web application. If you are a beginner, you need to follow many tutorials, and you will be overwhelmed by the number of new technologies, frameworks, and libraries that you have to learn. And if you are an expert, it will be hard for you to always keep your skills up to date with the latest trends. In this era where the time-to-market is pretty less, you cannot afford to waste your resources by creating codes from scratch or spending hours setting up your development environment. Wouldn't it be amazing if all of this were available by default? Here is where Boilerplates come into the picture.

In this blog post, let us get to know the perks of using a boilerplate for a speedy project setup. I will introduce you to the Open Sourced React boilerplates presented by our development team in Fibonalabs! Without further ado, let's get started.

What Are Boilerplates?  

Boilerplates are pre-built libraries that you can use to get a web application up and running as quickly as possible. A boilerplate is usually a code library that contains the bare minimum to get a website up and running. In some cases, it can also be a complete framework including a server and a database.

Why Do You Need Boilerplates?

Having a boilerplate for your project, whether you are a developer or a designer, is always a good idea. It saves a lot of time from going back and forth between setting up the scaffolding and getting your hands dirty with code; it also helps in sharing your code with others. You can use it to get a head start on new projects and work on the core functionality.

Using custom-designed React boilerplates shortened our initial sprints from 2 weeks to 3 days! Hmmm, this does sound like a fair deal!

Creating Your Boilerplates vs Using Existing Boilerplates

You may consider building your boilerplates, which is commendable, but we would like to emphasize that we are here to give you a chance to skip out on that process. Creating a new boilerplate is a daunting task, especially when you are starting with something new. Nowadays there are so many options to choose from and most of them have some very cool features. Most of the time you don’t need all the features of a boilerplate, you want something that you can start with and then expand upon as you progress.

The development team at Fibonalabs has created a set of boilerplates to help you ace your front-end development projects!

What Do We Have In Store?

We proudly present our open-source “React boilerplates” whose codes can be utilized and modified by the end user across any location. Here is a list of the key features of our boilerplate:

  1. Type checking with Typescript
  2. Supports Multiple Environment
  3. Linter with ESlint
  4. Code Formatter with Prettier
  5. Husky for Git Hooks
  6. Lint-staged for running linters on staged files
  7. Performance metrics with Lighthouse
  8. Generate massive amounts of fake(but realistic) data for testing and development using Faker
  9. Fast, lightweight, and reusable data fetching with SWR

Our boilerplate utilizes two frameworks and three types of UI kits. Let us assume that your team wants to get started with two CRA-based projects, but with tailwind as their UI kit for project 1, and material UI for the next one. We have kept these constraints in mind and provided you with 6 boilerplates under the Web-React boilerplate. You can reap the benefits of any combination of frameworks and UI kits that we provide by choosing any of our boilerplates!

Framework and UI kits

Now that you have got an idea about the frameworks and UI kits used in our boilerplate, here’s a quick overview of them!

Frameworks Used In Our Boilerplates

  • NextJS - NextJS is a framework, which is a collection of tools and frameworks, to help you build an application that is fast and secure. It helps in building server-rendered and statically served web apps. It is a simple library that is built on top of React.js. It is a minimalistic framework, which is suitable for building universal web apps, and it is in use by companies like Coca-Cola, Alibaba, and Kickstarter. The idea of NextJS is to provide a way to build universal JavaScript applications for both web and mobile. NextJS gives you everything you need to build a fast, secure, and feature-rich web-based application.

Features:

  1. Code splitting and bundling
  2. File system routing
  3. Fast refresh and Image optimization
  • Create React App - Create React app is a unique CLI tool to create react apps with zero build configuration. This tool is widely used for creating single-page web applications. It is used by some popular companies, such as Facebook, Airbnb, Bloomberg, and many more.

Features:

  1. Local development server
  2. Supports ES6 and ES7 (ECMAScript is another official name for JavaScript)
  3. Asset imports
  4. Code Splitting
  5. Supports CSS styling modules
  6. TypeScript support

UI Kits Used In Our Boilerplate

  • Material UI: Material Design is a lightweight front-end framework in React. It is built on top of Material Design by a team of designers and engineers. Material UI provides a set of ready-to-use components that are based on Material Design principles. It has many features such as an intuitive theme, built-in elements, and a flexible grid system. It is the best way to build web pages that are fully compatible with Google material design guidelines.

Features:

  1. Robust, customizable, and advanced components
  2. Automatic colour change
  3. Interoperability
  4. Switch between RTL (Register Transfer Level) and Non-RTL
  • Antd - Ant Design is a popular design system for the web that is based on React and Google's Material Design system. It is one of the most promising open-source React UI components libraries. Ant Design is an enterprise-class design framework that offers dozens of reusable components, a flexible grid system, and a style guide that allows you to create beautiful and consistent designs for your next project. Ant Design team tries to combine the best of both worlds, object-oriented programming, and design patterns, to make a product that is more powerful and flexible, so that designers and developers can focus more on the product experience than the details of UI templates.

Features:

  1. Powerful theme customization and detailing
  2. Written in TypeScript with predictable static types
  3. Internationalization support for dozens of languages
  • Tailwind - Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework for rapid UI development. Tailwind provides a huge collection of hand-picked, battle-tested, and responsive utility classes for rapid UI development. With just a few classes, you can achieve complex layout designs and animations. It is built on top of Sass and provides precompiled CSS and JavaScript components that can be dropped into any project. Tailwind will help you build a custom design system that is tailored to you and your project.

Features:

  1. Supports a wide range of interactive style elements like hover, focus, etc.
  2. Helps to create reusable abstractions
  3. Provides dark mode modifier to optimize sites for dark mode directly in HTML.
  4. PostCSS for processing Tailwind CSS

How Does It Work?

We have come up with a GUI for the boilerplate, where you can do the following steps to get started:

  1. Select the framework
  2. Select the UI kit
  3. Enter the project name and click on Submit

After this, an installation command will be generated and displayed with the Copy Option.

You need to copy the installation command and run the same in the terminal. The boilerplate will be cloned in your terminal, and you can kickstart your project successfully!