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Writer's pictureWhizzystack Solutions
Feb 1, 201811 min read

Some important CSS and JS Libraries


1. Styled components


An idea born in an Australian whisky bar has developed into a project of 18 K stars, widely embraced within the culture. Styled components make it simpler to use CSS in React components, by identifying styled components with encapsulated styles as a mediator layer without CSS classes. Styled-components are generated by literal notation using the ES6 framework to describe components. As you would normally do using CSS, CSS properties can be applied to the component as required. Styled components can create specific class names when the JS is parsed, and inject the CSS into the DOM. You will learn more about Max Stoiber in this great chat.


2. Radium



Radium is described as "A toolchain for React component styling" at 6.5 K stars and developed by FormidableLabs. With React without CSS, it's a collection of tools to handle inline types. Radium provides a simple interface and abstractions to manage CSS features that can not easily accommodate Radium inline styles, enabling you to bundle styles together with your React elements, combining javascript, html, and styling. It also provides rendering based on props, allowing you to design your components according to the state of your game.


3. Aphrodite

Aphrodite is a framework-agnostic CSS-in-JS library with server-side rendering support, browser prefixing and limited CSS generation support. Aphrodite transforms everything into classes, using the class attribute.

This project operates with or without Respond at 4 K stars and offers features such as modeled injection into the Dom, styles of auto prefixes and more, all at a fairly small size of 20k and a handful of dependencies. Here's a handy rundown of Aphrodite vs. Radium.

4. Emotion





At 4.2 K stars Emotion is a strong and versatile CSS-in-JS library that enables you to style string or object-based apps. To prevent variance problems with CSS it has uniform structure. Based on the glam library and its philosophy the concept is to maintain runtime output by parsing styles with babel and PostCSS while writing CSS. The core runtime is 2.3 kb, and 4 kb with support from React. Emotion isn't just about Reacting.


5. Glamorous


Note: the project is no longer actively maintained! still cool though :)



At 3.6 K stars, PayPal's Glamorous is focused to create styled components and jsxtyle inspired "maintainable CSS with React." Kent C. Dodds describes the project as "React component styling with an elegant (inspired) API, small footprint (< 5 kb gzipped) and great performance (through glamour)." It has a rather similar API to modeled parts, and under the hood it uses similar methods.


6. Glamor


Glamor, inspired by ideas from this great talk, is small and powerful. It helps you to write CSS inline in your components using the same supports for style prop Object CSS syntax React. It is fast and efficient, independent system, serverside / static rendering and adds vendor prefixes / fallback values. Here's a short introductory API notes, a comparison of Glamor CSS techniques and a helpful Glamor tutorial with Gatsby.


7. Fela


<FelaComponent
  style={{
  backgroundColor: 'blue',
  color: 'red'
  }}
  render={({ className, theme }) => (
  <div className={className}>I am red on blue.</div>
  )}
 />

Fela is a project developed in JavaScript for State-Driven Styling, highlighting 3 things: rendering styling dynamic by design, introducing framework-agnostic (Bindings for Reacting) and performing. Based on the state of the application it is adjustable by nature and renders types. It generates atomic CSS and supports all common features of CSS such as media queries, pseudo-classes, keyframes and font faces. It can be used on any view list, including the native React.


8. Styletron

















Thanks to this code-carrot post

Styletron is a "component-oriented styling toolkit" at 2500 stars. Styletron supports stateless, single-element styled components as primitive base styling with conditional / dynamic styling prop interfaces, and style composition via (typed) JavaScript objects without additional tooling (e.g. Webpack loaders, Babel plugins, etc.). The design of style objects is often un-opinioned on. This fascinating HN thread lets you know more.


9. JSS

JSS is a CSS abstraction that uses JavaScript to define styles in a declarative and maintenable manner. It is a high performance compiler JS to CSS that operates both runtime and server-side. This core library is agnostic at low level and frame, and is around 6 KB (minified and gzipped). This can also be expanded by API plugins. Here's a good SCSS (Sass) conversion tutorial here. Test out even React-JSS, a React JSS integration.


For their icon library the Bootstrap team recently published the Alpha 3 Update. The newest update adds tons of new designs and now has over 500 icons on the Bootstrap SVG icon pack. Bootstrap Icons are designed to interact with components in Bootstrap, from shape controls to navigation. Bootstrap icons are SVGs, so they can easily and quickly scale and be styled with CSS. Although built for Bootstrap, they will work in any project. They are open source (MIT), so you can access, use, and expand it free of charge. Heads up though, right now they are in alpha and open to drastic changes.



11. Polka

This is my short analysis of Polka which is "... just a native HTTP server with added routing, middleware, and sub-applications support ...!" even though express is relatively light, polka is lighter. What I find fascinating in this approach gives you even more insight into how to build an application. I think Polka is an excellent way to express yourself. With only a few extra modules, you'll have a fully fledged system with stable paths, templating, static files providing in a more lightweight (and hopefully faster) bundle all you have in express. It has not the same express acceptance but this could be an advantage.



Open-source tool to measure the performance of JS apps that offers an estimation of how much time end-users will need to run your Javascript. It can be plugged into Travis CI, Circle CI, GitHub Behavior so it runs automatically and prevents over-budget size limit commits.






Stryker is a very fascinating project in JavaScript and other languages to run mutation testing. It works by adding "mutations" to the code and running tests on them in random locations, testing how many of the mutations pass and how stable the code really is.

By an example let's explain this, Suppose you're creating an online casino. Users are only permitted to access the casino if they are over 18. So you write the following piece of code to test if anyone can access the site:


function isUserOldEnough(user) {
 return user.age >= 18;
}

Stryker will find the return statement and decide to change it in several ways:


/* 1 */ return user.age > 18;
/* 2 */ return user.age < 18;
/* 3 */ return false;
/* 4 */ return true;

We call such shifts mutants. After discovering the mutants, they are introduced one by one and the experiments are performed against them. If at least one of the experiments fails, we're saying the mutant is murdered. This is what we want to see! If no check fails, then it has succeeded. The better the experiments survive the fewer mutants.

Stryker produces the results in various formats. One of the easiest reporters to read is the plain text:


Mutant killed: /yourPath/yourFile.js: line 10:27
 Mutator: BinaryOperator
 - return user.age >= 18;
 + return user.age > 18;
 
 Mutant survived: /yourPath/yourFile.js: line 10:27
 Mutator: RemoveConditionals
 - return user.age >= 18;
 + return true;

The direct text reporter outputs precisely how the code has been changed and which mutator has been used. It would then tell us whether a mutant has been killed which means that at least one test has failed, or whether it has survived. In this case the second mutation is marked as survivor. This means that a test that specifically checks for age younger than 18 is possibly lacking




Dinero is a JavaScript library designed to work with monetary values. It has a well-designed API which contains all the methods for money and currency operations you might need. Dinero.js allows the development, estimation and formatting of monetary values in JavaScript. You can do arithmetic operations, read and format them thoroughly, search for a variety of items to make your own creation process simpler and safer.


15. Uppload



Uppload.js is a modern JavaScript library designed to enhance the experience of uploading images. The library offers an elegant interface for file collection that allows the user to drag-drop images from the locale.It also allows you to import images from any data source, such as URL, camera, Instagram post, Facebook public post, etc. Thanks to its plugin program, it provides multiple upload options, allowing you to add more image sources, such as Instagram, screenshots, Giphy and more.You are also allowed to crop, resize, rotate the client-side images until they are submitted to server.





Pure CSS library offering over 50 stylish checkbox toggles of a pleasant variety. These are very easy to use and customize-only surround a div in your checkbox, add the right class and it's done.




17. μPlot



Fast, memory-efficient diagram library to generate superb 2D Canvas-based charts. It offers lots of different types of graphs, lots of customization options and other cool features.




Easy but still very successful progress bar plugin with promising support and smooth animations. It is super easy to configure and very useful to show the load times at the top of the page.

Bootstrap treeview is used to represent hierarchical information starting with the root element and continuing with its children and their respective items. Besides the root every element has a parent and can have children. Easy Bootstrap 4 plugin designed to build elegant treeviews with collapse list objects. It's a fantastic little feature and we wouldn't be shocked to see it integrated with future Bootstrap models. Siblings are objects with one parent and the same. Objects can collapse and expand.





Electron React Boilerplate uses Electron, React, Redux, React Router, Webpack and React Hot Loader for rapid application creation (HMR).Great starting kit for the production of Electron-based cross-platform mobile applications. The project GitHub provides a strong framework to help you customize everything and get started in no time.




They're panolens. Js is a WebGL focused and event-driven panoramic viewer. Lean and versatile. It is constructed over Three. Amazing JavaScript panorama viewer library right in the browser to create beautiful 360 ° experience. Three.js-based library keeps output fast and smooth, even when viewing high quality images or videos.




Very smart solution for adding comments to your website which uses GitHub as a discussion source. The project consists of a GitHub App and a JS library working together to view a fully featured comment section, hosted within a selected repo issue of GitHub.


23. Rome



Rome is a toolchain experimental to JavaScript. It includes a parser, linter, formatter, bundler, frame checking and more. It aims to be a detailed platform for everything that relates to JavaScript source code production. Rome is not a set of known instruments. All the tools are designed specifically for Rome, do not rely on any external dependencies and are made to communicate with each other seamlessly.




MassCode is a snippet manager for developers of open-source code. This nice little app offers a clean interface for all of your code snippets and cheatsheets to handle. Runs on Mac, Linux and Windows.




The Bootstrap team's new linter tool that lets you test if your pages use Bootstrap's components with properly organized HTML. It also ensures the appropriate tags are used, an HTML5 doctype declaration is included, and the page's overall markup is accurate.




This library uses the mix-blend-mode css to get Dark Mode on all of your websites. Only copy and paste the snippet and you'll get a plugin to turn the Dark Mode on and off. You can also use it programmatically, without the button. Lightweight module, installed in Vanilla. Super lightweight JS library to help you integrate dark & light teams into your applications. It senses local time for the user and changes the UI appearance accordingly. It doesn't have light and dark themes.




Modern 2D engine designed to render browser games. This versatile toolkit for game development features a Canvas-based rendering engine, aids in physics and sound, gamepad support, integrated design tools, and more.




A tiny JS tool which makes adding overlay instructions for your apps super simple. These guides can be extremely helpful to clarify the UI, demote the various features of the app or simply show the user what to do next.




Share. Js is a lightweight, zero-dependent JS library that transforms any text selected into quotes that can be posted on Twitter and/or Facebook, as you can see in Medium.com.


30. Lottie



Lottie is an Android, iOS, Web, and Windows library that parses Adobe After Effects animations exported as json with Bodymovin and makes them natively accessible on the smartphone and on the web! The Airbnb developer team's incredible library that exports Adobe After. This makes animations that can be very complex with lots of details and keyframes as well as being super-performing and smooth buttery. It's now designed to expand its use to android, iOS, React Native and Windows in addition to his great work.




View-Interactive-Paycard-Smooth and sweet micro-interaction credit card shape. Includes the printing of numbers, validation and automatic identification of type of token. Designed with viewjs, and completely sensitive as well. Very impressive credit card snippet type which beautifully animates as users input their data. One of the finest projects we've seen all year round, with everything polished to perfection, from the typography to the animations. It's not only pretty either-the card is also very user friendly with the formatting of numbers, validation and the identification of card size. Also, when entering cc info, users actually prefer a well-known interface and not some custom UI.




Cube.js is a scalable open source platform for building analytical web applications and designing your own sophisticated, custom analytics systems. It consists of a wide SDK frontend and a lightweight API backend which can be linked to most databases and systems like MySQL, Postreges and MongoDB .. It is primarily used for developing internal business intelligence tools or for applying customer-facing analytics to an existing app.




Tesseract. Js is the pure Javascript port of Tesseract's popular OCR engine. Node and browser JavaScript library which extracts text from images. It analyzes the image, automatically detects location and orientation of the text, and with great precision extracts words and sentences. Tessaract can recognize more than 60 languages including more complex ones such as Chinese, Arabic and Russian


34. Barba



Lightweight library for linking seamless transitions to pages on your website. It takes up your usual static website and makes it a great-looking single-page application experience. It helps to reduce the delay between loading pages, to decrease requests for HTTP, and to make the web feel more premium.




This fun JavaScript library allows for the control of animated GIF playback. It can start and pause the GIFs, for example, based on user feedback such as clicks or hover. As it uses a canvas feature to draw the individual frames, it is also very performant under the hood.


36.Ink




React-based App building command line interface. It provides a great range of predefined components which can be used to accelerate the creation of terminal interfaces while also allowing features such as more sophisticated templates and controls to be added.



This fun library speeds up loading times when users hover over them by prefretching the links. This makes loading of a page faster until the user clicks on a connection and navigates to the next page. With the latest update it can also automatically prefix all links in a list-great for static content.




FilePond is a JavaScript library that lets you upload silky smooth drag n 'drop files. It has a polished UI which is a pleasure to use, while also offering some interesting features under the hood such as optimizing photos for quicker uploads. Just 21 kB gzipped, with adapters available with React, Vue, and jQuery for easier implementation. These docs can assist in downloading, setting up, updating and extending FilePond. If you don't know FilePond you can find more detail on the FilePond product page.




Micromodalistic. Js is a modal library written in pure JavaScript, lightweight, configurable and 11y-enabled. It helps you to build modal dialogs consistent with WAI-ARIA guidelines, with trust and with minimal configuration. Minified and gzipped at just 1.9 kb, it's a tiny library for big change.




A great project for all of you who want to take their first steps in machine learning, Brain.js offers a powerful framework for working in a JavaScript environment with the neural networks. It has lots of examples of excellent documentation that will help you understand some of the most important ML techniques.




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This article is contributed by Ujjainee. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science . She likes most about Computer Engineering is that it allows her to learn and be creative. Also, She believes in sharing knowledge hence is very fond of writing technical contents for the same. Coding, analyzing and blogging are things which She can keep on doing!!

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