Ten years ago, if you wanted to make a good-looking website it was pretty hard.
Sure, you knew there was this thing called CSS you could use to style your site, but figuring out how to actually go from CSS to an elegant website seemed to require an advanced degree in web development.
Then a little CSS Framework called Bootstrap came along and changed everything.
Suddenly, you didn't have to know all the internals of CSS and figure out every little detail yourself—you could start from a clean, easy-to-extend set of working examples for each component you needed. Navigation, column layouts, forms, dialogs—whatever your website needed you could get from Bootstrap. Almost overnight, building websites got a whole lot faster and easier. You could gloss over the drudgery and details and focus on your unique personal message.
These days, building websites is even easier than it was back then. Heck, for most sites you probably don't need to know any coding at all. Sites like SquareSpace, Wordpress and Wix let you build great-looking sites without ever touching a line of code.
But what if you need more than a web-site? What if you need a web-app? You know, something that has accounts, users, teams, data, etc.
Well, unfortunately, then you're still probably going to need to code. And, unfortunately, it still looks a bit like the website world 10 years ago.
Sure, there are web frameworks that make the process quite a bit easier - things like Rails, Laravel, or Django. They make it easy to interact with data models, users, and of course your HTML/CSS/JS templates.
But, these frameworks—much like CSS—often feel like they require an advanced degree in web development to use. They provide all of the raw materials you need to build your web app, but they still rely on you figuring out how to piece all those materials together to actually turn them into a functional site. And that takes a whole lot of time.
But what if it didn't have to work that way? What if—in the same way Bootstrap made it so much easier to work with CSS—you could take a shortcut to build your web app? What if you started with functional, beautiful examples and just had to build and customize on top of them?
That's the goal I have with this project. I want to take the drudgery and ramp-up time out of building web applications. I want to provide a feature-rich, easily extensible foundation that provides the skeleton and glue for your web application so you can focus on the true task at hand: realizing your vision.