How Storybook Makes Your UI Development Super Easy

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If you’re a JavaScript developer, you’ve no doubt jumped on the “Components are the best!” train, and use a development platform like React, Vue, or Angular. And for good reason, we all know of the joy of building applications from a collection of highly specialized, composable, and (hopefully) tested components can bring. Heck, the software practically writes itself! (But don’t tell our clients or bosses that.)

The problem (isn’t there always one?) is that as your application starts to grow, issues with this approach start to creep in. Consistency can be difficult to maintain. Testing starts to get more difficult. And while we often strive to build these components as stand-alone, isolated pieces of software, we usually end up needing to build and run the whole application to even see what they look like. And this can slow you down. And hey, wouldn’t it be nice if the QA people could actually help us out with some of this lower-level testing instead of having to go through the same simple 82-step process to make sure that we changed that font color from light blue to slightly lighter-blue?

The good news is that Storybook is here to make our lives (as developers anyway) so much easier!

Storybooks website says it’s an interface development and playground for UI components. But it’s so much more than that! With Storybook, you can develop your component in TRUE isolation, meaning that you don’t need to run the entire application to see how changes to your code affect how your component looks and works. It also helps developers stay consistent, helps provide component-level documentation, makes testing a lot easier, and enables QA to examine the components and try different scenarios to see how the component and the application react in different situations.

In this session, you’ll see how to add Storybook to your application, how the tooling works, and how to start writing your own stories. And while the examples will be in React, Storybook supports every major component-based platform, so the knowledge you gain will easily translate into whatever framework you’re working with.

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