Experience with FAST

[r1m]

Hello there,

I'm investigating the options to create or new Design System based on web components.
I see that you actually switched from a Lit based project to FAST. I'm wondering if you could provide some insights that led to this change.

FAST documentation seems a bit confusing and I'm expecting a huge learning curve for newcomers on the project.
What is your feedback so far ?
Did you investigate alternative like Lion , Shoelace fork, ...?

Thanks a lot

[YonatanKra]

Hi.

It's great to meet a fellow web componenter and design systemer ;)

So yes, you are correct. We moved from lit to fast for various reasons. Here's why we chose fast in the first place (and it's getting better):

1. The Fast roadmap is clear - and fits our need
2. Fast tries to implement according to the HTML spec. While working with Lit, we found out there are problems when diverting from it. Some problems relate to how people are used to work (people are using our components and expect some native behaviors to work). Other problems relate to how some frameworks work (for instance, angular reactive forms expect a native API from the components).
3. Fast templating system is more convenient for us. Moreover, it is SSR-Ready (look at the SSR branch, which relies on their best practices)
4. Fast is cleaner and separates template from logic. There's always more to be desired when you reach edge cases, but all in all, the ergonomics for a developer are super easy.

There are more reasons, but these are relatively strong ones we were looking for when searching for a web component "framework" to work with.

We also created Nx generators for components, so onboarding is very short. Just run nx g @vonage/nx-vivid:component and you have a ready-to-use template with tests, UI tests etc.

So yea, we're happy with it, and it works for us :)

Does this answer your question? You are more than welcome to ask questions about our experience with it.

Cheers,
Yonatan

[r1m]

Thanks for the clear answer.
I'm still experiencing with FAST but I really appreciate your feedback.