Recently, I learned to use Bootstrap 5 in ICS 314. I would say that it was an interesting experience.Why bootstrap? I believe that people in the programming industry use Bootstrap because it provides pre-designed components and layouts that you can use easily. This saves you time and effort in creating them from scratch with plain html and css. This can significantly speed up the development process rather than having to use a bunch of different lines in css to create the same thing that can be done in one line with Bootstrap. While Bootstrap provides default styles and components, it’s also highly customizable. You can easily override default styles or create your own components to fit your project’s specific needs. One particular part of bootstrap that we went over this week that I thought was really cool was the use of different icons, like the instagram one for example. You could essentially write down a couple phrases and have the icons of many different social media platforms and more instantly. If i think about how I would have done this in html and css, I would have absolutely no idea.
If I could describe my experience with learning bootstrap, I would say that it like playing an instrument without any prior knowledge, vs playing it beautifully when I have pratice regularly and know a lot of the ins and outs. This is because it Boostrap, figuring about what phrases to use in the class that are related to the outcome you want was really difficult for me in the begging. This is because I had no knowledge of it or thedifferent abbrexiation that bootstrap uses to do certain things, like p equals to padding. But once you learn all these abbreviations and learn what phrases equal what outcome, bootstrap becomes easy and is infenley better than plain html and css because you can do more while writing less.
Why not html and css? In some cases, I believe HTML and CSS can be easier and work better than Bootstrap. One particular instance is when you need to create a very custom design. Because bootstrap provides pre-built components and styles, when you want a very specific and different design, there is no point in using UI frameworks. However, UI frameworks offer several software engineering benefits. For example these pre-built components andn styles save you a lot of time and effort since it is already built and just needs to be integrated into your project. Another thing that I found out recently is that UI frameworks offer grid systems and components that automatically adjust to different screen sizes. This is essential in today’s tech world because we have a lot of digital devices with different screen sizes such as a phone vs a desktop computer. Now if we were to just use html and css to automatically adjust to different screen sizes, it would take a lot of code. But with UI frameworks it is easily accessible. Thus, overall I think that UI frameworks are great as they make the life of a programmer much easier.