Utopia? Echoes of Delphi and Dreamweaver in new visual editor for React

Looking for a design and coding tool for React? A new effort, Utopia, was released in alpha this week. Facebook-sponsored React is the most popular JavaScript framework for building user interfaces – the StackOverflow 2020 survey reported usage by 35.9 per cent of developers, ahead of Angular at 25.1 per cent – and is also …

[trevorde]

It's 2021 ...

... and the recommended way of developing a UI is *still* to code it by hand.

Delphi, Visual Basic and WinForms were 99% drag-drop; everything else (MFC, WPF, HTML, JQueryUI, React, Angular, etc) was a pain.

Just hope this works but I'm not holding my breath.

[lotus123]

Re: It's 2021 ...

Contrary to what Delphi has they do not have anything that takes data from the external source. For example to display the list they have code for each element of that list. So yeah. Do not hold your breath yet.

[Lon24]

HoTMeTaL Pro

Tish. Dreamweaver & Frontpage were pretty bad. Whereas HoTMetaL Pro (note the capitalisation) produced good code fast and you could slide between pure code, illustrated code and full preview at a mouseclick. So far ahead of its time it was a threat to all the wannabees.

Hence Corel bought it up and closed it down. It still lives on in a Win2K VM as I still have some customers running sites developed with HoTMetaL who refuse to pay me to redevelop them as 21C sites and now revel in the retro-glow of people who surf the interwebs to the sound of authentic vinyl music and dodgy cigars. And flares, don't forget the flares ...

One of the last pieces of software I paid good money for. Like all the other good software the developers would be bought out and your investment wiped out. Whereas if you stuck to FOSS then if it was any good software could survive death, debilitation or monetisation by some other good soul forking it. Better deal in the long run I found. Free isn't always about price.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: HoTMeTaL Pro

FrontPage was awful but I found some versions of Dreamweaver to be pretty okay for round tripping even with server templates like ZPT. But the major change was the widescale adoption of CSS for layout and the subsequent shift to responsive design, meaning you really only need to play around with the CSS.

[Blitheringeejit]

I had managed...

...to not think about Frontpage <shudder> for well over a decade. Now thanks to this article I am back in therapy.

[ClockworkOwl]

Re: I had managed...

I hear your Frontpage induced wailing, and leave you with the further torture of:

Cold Fusion!!!

(Runs away gibbering..>

[Charlie Clark]

Re: I had managed...

… out of the cold frying pan into the Net Objects Fusion?

[Graham Dawson]

I always used coffeecup. It was also terrible, but less so than frontpage or the other one.

[DROP DATABASE]

Why the past tense? Delphi Still does this.

[John 110]

"...Delphi Still does this..."

and its Open Source offspring, Lazarus.

[Mike_in_Oz]

my memory is not THAT bad..

Was coding/designing a neat GUI only yesterday with Lazarus. Fast scientific graphics, user-friendly buttons, check boxes, high res printing, and I even stuck in a seperate thread for the serious number crunching. Not one but 4 best-of-alls, to wit:1. recompile on Win or Linux with no or exceedingly minor changes 2. deploy executable as a single file (yay!) 3. Fast as C on my benchmarks and 4. Its open source and free (oh, and is very well documented....)