I went to a great meetup this week by a group called Modern Web. They attract the biggest meetup group I’ve ever seen, and host talks on new web development technologies.
At this meetup, I was most interested in a talk by Red Hat’s Tom Dalbo. Red Hat is a company here in North Carolina that provides open source software products. I read a report that in company contributions to open source projects, they rank third.
An Aside:
My interest in open source started a couple of years ago in my work as an English Professor at a community college. We received a grant to create a degree plan where students could complete an associates degree without paying any costs for textbooks. They called it the zero-textbook-cost degree or Z degree. As part of the grant, I was asked to create a literature course that relied entirely on open educational resources that could be provided to the students at no cost to them and without any infringement on copyright.
I was lucky that my course was on Old English Literature (think Beowulf), so all the original texts were out of copyright. But I still had a lot to learn about open source translations (Old English is a different language) and scholarly criticisms to supplement the literature, and how the open educational resources were being used.
Around the same time, I started learning to code and discovered open source projects. And that’s where it all began for me.
Back to the Story:
Tom Dalbo explained that his group at Red Hat is working on a new project that they call RHElements (RH for Red Hat, but pronounced relements). They are standards-based, reusable, accessible components that you can incorporate into your React project.
Dalbo said we have all these great technologies, why do I have to build a button all over again every time I start a new project?
To me, this seems like a great idea. Once the project has expanded enough, it will offer simple, reusable components that can be imported into your own project.
After listening to the talk and seeing the demonstration, I would compare RHElements to Bootstrap. Bootstrap provides some simple ways to incorporate CSS and some basic JavaScript so that every developer doesn’t have to build modals or sliders or button colors from scratch every single time they build a project. In the same way, RHElements could offer some basic components that just help get a project running faster and then as the developer, you can manipulate and style them.
I know the complaints about Bootstrap – that with Bootstrap every website looks exactly the same. I can totally agree, but I’ll play devil’s advocate with a problem that I ran into with my own React project. I was trying to use an icon instead of a standard button, but it wasn’t obvious that you should of could click on the icon to make something happen, so when I had others take a look at my project, they just didn’t get it. I swapped the icon out for a button, and everyone agreed that made it much clearer.
So there will be pros and cons to everything, but it will be interesting to see this library of RHElements components develop.