After half a year’s efforts, today we’re finally releasing Fower v1.0.

What is Fower?

Fower is a styling tool library that allows you to efficiently develop UI. The goal is to make it easier for you to write CSS. The core features of Fower are Atomic, Type Safe, and CSS in JS. It pays great attention to the development experience, allowing you to build user interface quickly and happily.

The Story

A year ago, our team was developing Web, React native, and Mini Program projects at the same time. In these three types of projects, we used different styling tool:

• In the Web project, we use styed-component to write style;
• In the React native project, we use the StyleSheet.create that comes with React native;
• In the Mini Program project, We use Sass to write css;

The three style solutions are written in different way, which makes us particularly painful when writing styles:

• The development experience is poor. When developing the same user interface, we need to write three types of css code, and need to constantly switch habits and thinking.
• The tool chain is too broad and too complicated,，Styled-component、Sass、StyleSheet.create…
• Development efficiency is low, and there are too many duplicate codes.
• CSS has many inherent shortcomings and poor maintainability.

Later，We discovered Tailwindcss, A utility-first CSS framework. We started to use Tailwindcss in the web project. After some time, we found that the development experience is very good, the development efficiency is very high, especially suitable for our projects that require a highly customized interface. Unfortunately, Tailwindcss cannot be used directly in non-web projects such as React native.

The members of our team like the style of Tailwindcss, so we create Fower, it allows us to unify the way we write styles for all projects.

Similar to Tailwindcss, we also use the concept of utility-first, but Fower is a bit different. Fower uses Atomic Props to write styles.

Core concepts

Fower is opinionated and we created it based on the following concepts:

• utility-first, it allows us to write styles more quickly. Unlike other “utility-first” CSS frameworks, Fower uses “Atomic style prop” to write styles.
• Type safe, Our team is a heavy user of TypeScript. The intellisense brought by Type safe make us hardly read the documents, and we do not rely on any editor plugin when writing code to get accurate auto-completion.
• Framework-agnostic, This is one of the main reasons we created Fower. Fower allows you to write styles in React, Vue, and React Native in a consistent way.
• CSS in JS, We hate to write CSS in a separate CSS file. Pure CSS has many shortcomings, such as: unable to access JS variables; easy to produce style conflicts; easy to generate dead code… We like to use JS (CSS in JS) to write styles, which is more Suitable in the age component. In fact, Fower is not just CSS in JS, we also call it CSS in HTML.

Some Cool features

Fower has many features, such as atomic classes, responsiveness, pseudo-classes, themes, design systems, CSS in JS…, I think these are the basic feature of Fower, not special feature.

#css #vuejs #react