Show HN: uiloos a Headless Component Library
Hi my name is Maarten Hus and today I'm releasing my commercial
headless component library.

It can be used to create carousels, tabs, accordions, sortables,
image galleries, typewriter animations both single and multi
cursor, notification centers, modals, flash messages, date pickers,
date range pickers and calendars.

My story is that I've been a web developer since 2007 and during
this time I keep having the same problem: I need some functionality
such as a carousel, or date picker, or a way to show flash messages,
and I find a nice library with all the features I need... but it does
not integrate well.

Either the CSS of the component causes conflicts, or the component
cannot easily be customized visually or structurally. This makes using
libraries not always feasible when branding is important. It can be
so jarring to see a component that is completely out of style with
the rest the site.

At the same time I also got to work with web developers that are
masters of CSS and accessibility, but programming complex JavaScript
is just out of their reach. They can copy and paste examples, and
fiddle with existing code but find it difficult to write new code.

So whenever you need to be in total control of the HTML and CSS you
are mostly out of luck, and you will have to roll up your sleeves
and program the thing yourself. Which always ends up taking way more
time than you initially estimate, as UI components are surprisingly
fickle beasts.

This is where the idea for uiloos came from: what if there was a
library of common behaviors for the web which can easily be configured
for your specific needs.

Want a carousel that automatically goes to the next slide, just
configure it. Want a carousel that stops whenever the user interacts
with the carousel, just configure it. Want a carousel that is
"circular" (last slide goes to first slide), just configure it.

You bring your designs, your HTML, your CSS and your accessibility
story, and let me handle those pesky behaviors.

In my mind uiloos has three parts: the first is the core which are
just plain JavaScript (written in TypeScript) classes and functions
in which all the behaviors are encoded. These are then unit tested
against loads of scenarios.

The second part are the bindings for various frameworks, which are at
this time : Angular, React, Svelte, Vue and Alpine.js. They make
handling the DOM manipulation a breeze.

You can also use vanilla JavaScript in combination with the core,
but you will have to handle the DOM manipulations yourself. I've tried
to make this feasible by making every component of uiloos observable.
This means you can subscribe to changes and update the DOM in one
place, but be able to trigger events from anywhere else. I call this
the "sink" based model, as all events flow to the same drain.

The third part is documentation, from API docs, to examples, to
tutorials and many sandboxes. The idea being that what cannot fit
into uiloos core, such as various techniques can be stored there.
Techniques such as how to set CSS variables from JS, or how to write
those `useEffect` calls in React.

My end-goal is to collect all UI behaviors into uiloos, and this
requires time and therefore money. So I made the decision to make
this a commercial library, which in turn sends me into the
notoriously difficult devtools market. So which me luck!

My pricing strategy is that you pay per domain on which you use
uiloos, or per developer if you are a web agency, with a subscription
for updates. It also has a perpetual license so if you stop your
subscription you always have a fallback.

Also to make uiloos as easy as possible to integrate with a project
it is hosted on NPM, and does not require any sort of activation
/ phone call home in order to work.

Be sure to check out the examples, and if you have any questions
please ask them!