Wow, author of Cosmos here. For the record I didn't post this. So thanks to OP and everyone who upvoted. It's cool that Cosmos still generates new interest after so many years.<p>Yes, Cosmos is very similar to Storybook. It's also older, and I'm only saying this because I'm tired of getting asked how does it differ. Both projects provide an isolated component environment to help tackle complexity in single page apps. The difference boils down to setup compatibility and personal taste.<p>I'm not gonna lie, some of the comments are tough to process, but what can you do. I still appreciate all feedback and as usual I'll try to incorporate it as best as I can.
The homepage here would be much improved by explaining what the heck this project does in simple terms without making me scroll a ton and wait for fade-in animations. I'm not going to use a project that cares more about "hype" than about delivering value. Even the title tagline sounds like buzzword noise. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I <i>love</i> Cosmos! We used to use storybook a few years back but it required ongoing maintenance whenever we made changes to our build configs which meant it would slowly fall behind the rest of our application over time. The brilliance of Cosmos is that it relies on your existing configs to build the components, so it's just a "set it and forget it" setup. Being able to produce static builds is also great and we rely on this to generate component previews in our CI so that QA can review component appearance and behavior before we even merge them into development. The Cosmos UI hooks are also a clever use of hooks that allow the fixtures to be tested by non-technical people in a manner that aligns with the logical boundaries of the component's design from an engineering perspective. The approach to designating a fixture file using the .fixture extension is also low effort meaning engineers actually do it. It's awesome, I highly recommend it if you work on a complex react front-end with many individual components.
I struggled to work out what this was until I found a link to these explainer tweets: <a href="https://twitter.com/ReactCosmos/status/1189127279533793281" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ReactCosmos/status/1189127279533793281</a><p>Even that wasn't high level enough but their twitter headline is: "A tool for ambitious UI developers"<p>So piecing it all together I'd guess that it's an online IDE that combines some clever stuff with components :shrug:
I read the Getting Started and it seems like this creates a webpage that you can use to speed up iteration on your components? Should there be a screenshot of that on your landing page? The live demo doesn't really work on mobile. What else does this do? What problem does it solve? How does it solve that? Saying it solves "Reusable components" is pretty generic, could use some expansion on how it actually helps in this regard.<p>Your landing page is beautiful, but it does a poor job explaining itself.
This looks great! I think a similar framework Storybook should also be noted.<p>I definitely see a future where the IDE has much more awareness of your development environment, this is a step in that direction at least for React.<p>Game developers get a lot of these benefits from their IDE typically having more tools than webdevs with a text editor. Hoping to see more of this in the future!
How does this compare to storybook? I've used storybook for ages and it's a great tool but is there a good reason to consider cosmos over it?
> You're doing important work. Keep rocking.<p>> Dan Abramov<p>Is this just a general quote from Dan, or is it about this product specifically?
Perhaps also similar to ClojureScript "devcards": <a href="https://github.com/bhauman/devcards" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bhauman/devcards</a>