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27 Feb 2025What are UI Frameworks?
User Interface (UI) frameworks are not simple in the slightest. They are a collection of pre-made classes and libraries for website development. There is a lot to learn, catch up on, and understand. It is like learning a new programming language all over again. Given the difficulty of the climb, is it worth the effort?
Reflecting on Bootstrap 5
Honestly, the answer is somewhat mixed for me. The purpose of UI frameworks is clearly to help developers create responsive, user-friendly designs in a fraction of the time. UI frameworks contain pre-made designs for buttons, icons, menus, and more. However, having the toolset doesn’t make you a good builder.
This week, we used Bootstrap 5, a popular UI framework, to create websites such as a navigation bar, background image, and footer. Bootstrap 5 provides the containers, navigation, and footer classes necessary to make these designs quickly and easily. But for me, at least, I need to set time aside to learn the tools I have been provided.
It is one thing to code but another to understand your code. Being able to explain it, replicate it without needing to constantly reference past work, and know the classes available to me are key. I do see myself struggling against a steep learning curve due to the vastness of the code UI frameworks contain. Despite this, I will try my best to overcome all challenges.
UI frameworks are meant to make designing more manageable and faster. With just a couple of lines of code added to your project, you can get access to Bootstrap styles, components, and icons. Check out Bootstrap icons here. Do any of the icons look familiar? Haha.
Would I recommend Bootstrap 5? Of course!
Here are two websites I made to show the greatness of UI frameworks. The left website uses Bootstrap while the other website does not use any UI frameworks.
The website built with Bootstrap looks much cleaner if you ask me. Also, the number of lines of code I needed to write was much less since the classes already provided the basic structure. The issue is knowing how to apply and combine the classes to create the desired designs. So, I will try my best to learn more about Bootstrap 5 as I will any other UI framework or toolset I encounter in the future. I am excited to learn more about Bootstrap 5!