Chakra UI | VSCode

Overview

Anima Frontier empowers development teams to generate new compositions efficiently. Code for screens and complex components is produced by leveraging an existing, themed design system (DS) based on Chakra UI or any other React UI library. The platform enables developers to focus on creating larger UI structures by utilizing predefined components and styles from their design system, ensuring a consistent and scalable user interface.

With the growing popularity of component libraries like Chakra UI, Frontier's focus on component analysis and composition provides an easy way to integrate these libraries, helping developers maintain consistency across projects. While full theming support for Chakra UI is currently under development, Frontier already offers essential tools for inspecting components and rapidly composing new screens.

About Chakra UI

Chakra UI is a popular React component library designed to help developers build accessible, customizable, and responsive user interfaces with ease. Chakra UI comes with a set of simple, modular, and reusable components that are optimized for performance. It integrates effortlessly with tools like CSS-in-JS, making it easy to apply themes and responsive styles. Chakra UI is known for its strong focus on accessibility, ensuring that components are keyboard-navigable and screen reader friendly right out of the box. Its flexibility and simplicity have made it a favorite among developers building modern, user-friendly web applications.

Main flow: Generating compositions based on an existing design system

Frontier's primary strength lies in its ability to generate complex compositions based on your existing design system. Whether using libraries like Chakra UI, MUI, or AntD, Frontier integrates these components and provides a powerful composition tool to create larger organisms and screens with ease, based on Figma designs.

Key Features:

Component analysis: Frontier allows you to inspect, analyze, and categorize the atomic components in your code, helping you understand the structure and usage of each element. For developers that are new to the codebase, it is a fast way to get an overview of existing components and their usage.
Rapid composition based on Figma: Generate new screens and larger UI structures by combining your existing components, ensuring alignment with your design system by simply providing a Figma design link.
Consistency at scale: Frontier ensures that all components maintain design coherence as you build more complex UI flows, making scaling your user interface effortless.

This flow is especially useful for organizations with a well-defined design system, as Frontier speeds up the process of composing and scaling user interfaces by leveraging existing components.

Code & Component Analysis

Frontier offers in-depth insights into your code and component structure through its scanning and analysis tools. The platform categorizes components, identifies reusable elements, and promotes better code management.

How It Works:

Open the Extension:
Activate Frontier from the VS Code sidebar to begin. Frontier will start analyzing your codebase to provide insights into your project's components and structure.
Component Scanning:
Frontier scans your project to detect and categorize both external components (from design systems, other repositories, or open-source libraries) and local components (developed within the current repository).

For each component, Frontier provides:
- Props: The properties each component accepts, including types and values.
- Associated Files: The files related to the component.
- Usage Examples: Access direct links to where components are used within the project, including the last edit date and contributor information.
Conventions Scanning:
Frontier analyzes coding patterns and styles in your project, ensuring that the generated code adheres to your existing standards. You can refine Frontier's interpretations to match your team's coding conventions if necessary.

Benefits of Code & Component Analysis:

Quick Onboarding: New developers can easily familiarize themselves with the project by understanding its components and conventions.
Code Clean-Up: Identify and remove unused or redundant components to maintain an efficient codebase.
Efficient Development: Developers can quickly find and reuse existing components, speeding up the development process.
Maintainability: Promotes best practices by ensuring that developers can see which components are up to date and implemented by expert contributors.

Establishing a New Design System (DS)

For teams without a well-defined design system, Frontier aids in the creation of one, but it does not offer theming for Chakra UI today. Meaning that the theming of the basic atoms of Chakra UI has to be done externally.

Theming Components

Theming is a crucial aspect of establishing a cohesive design system. By applying themes to atomic components (such as those in libraries like Chakra UI), developers can ensure their user interface aligns with brand guidelines. While full theming support for Chakra UI is coming soon, Anima supports theming for MUI within Figma’s Dev Mode.

Steps for creating a new DS:

Select your basic set of components from Chakra UI, and add the ones missing:
Establish the foundational UI elements, whether you’re building from scratch or using a component library like Chakra UI.
Apply theming: [Before using Frontier]
Once atomic components are defined, apply a theme that reflects your brand’s identity. This process includes styling, color schemes, and typography.

For now, Chakra UI theming can be applied manually by adjusting Chakra’s extendTheme functionality or using custom CSS.
```
// Example: Custom theme extension for Chakra UI components
import { extendTheme } from '@chakra-ui/react';

const theme = extendTheme({
  colors: {
    primary: '#your-primary-color',
  },
});

export default theme;
```
Utilize Frontier for composition:
After your design system atoms are in place and themed, Frontier becomes a powerful tool for composing new screens, templates, and organisms. Frontier helps developers efficiently scale user interfaces by automating much of the component assembly, turning Figma designs into compositions of your existing code components.

Component matching: Bridging design and development

Frontier integrates your design and development environments by matching components in your Figma designs with the code components in your project. This process ensures consistency between the design and development stages and speeds up the conversion of designs into functional code.

How It works:

Initial scan:
When you open Frontier in VS Code, it scans your codebase to identify and catalog all available components.
Link to your Figma file:
Provide a link to your Figma file, allowing Frontier to match the components in your design with the code components it has scanned. Frontier will then analyze the design components and propose matches from your existing codebase.
Review matches:
Frontier suggests the best properties and components to match your Figma designs. If needed, you can manually override Frontier’s suggestions.

Benefits of component matching:

Efficiency: Reduces the time required to translate designs into code by leveraging existing components.
Consistency: Ensures that UI components are consistent across designs and implementations.

The roadmap for Chakra UI theming support

Frontier has introduced theming support for MUI within Figma’s Dev Mode, allowing teams using MUI to apply custom themes directly from their designs. Full theming support for Chakra UI is in development, enabling teams to customize and theme their Chakra UI components directly within Frontier once released.

For now, developers can manually theme their Chakra UI components outside of Frontier while using the platform for component composition and analysis.