Assess which UI toolkit to build upon

[aesedepece]

This is a continuation of #13.

In this case, we need to assess their compatibility and ease of use with React.

Here are some curated list of UI component collections:
https://github.com/brillout/awesome-react-components#ui-frameworks
https://hackernoon.com/the-coolest-react-ui-frameworks-for-your-new-react-app-ad699fffd651

We like Semantic UI so far, but we are open to exploring other options.

[aesedepece]

@mariocao what were your findings while trying semantic-ui last week?

[mariocao]

Semantic UI looks great, but perhaps some components are missing, i.e. Date Picker. The TypeScript support could be better. However, re-styling seems easier than other UI toolkits. Ant Design seems also pretty good as it has been written in TypeScript. Both toolkits have a extensive documentation full of examples.

[aesedepece]

Today @mariocao suggested writing our own UI toolkit from scratch.

Rationale: using Semantic or Ant is great for quick prototyping, but they can be a burden on the long term as we try to create more complex components or make them look exactly as designed.

Actionable: discuss and decide on our current options:

• Using Semantic UI or Ant Design for the time being and replace them in the future for a custom solution when we feel the need for it.
• Going all in with our own toolkit.

Considerations:

• The moment when we feel the need for it may not be too far in time from now. Start using a framework only to ditch it after a couple of weeks is not cool.
• There may be a compromise between using an off-the-shelf UI toolkit or writing our own: for example we can resort to an existing toolkit only for layouts and then implement our own components.

[aesedepece]

We are going with antd. We'll prototype everything with stock components and then progressively replace / extend them to make their look and feel match our own style with the smallest change possible to each component's own API.