A new code generator wants to make it easier for designers and front-end programmers to create Web applications. Protoship is a code generator designed to create HTML, React and SASS components from design, without having to write CSS and HTML manually.
“Unlike the output from typical code-generation tools, Protoship will produce good code indistinguishable from what a developer would painstakingly craft themselves,” wrote Jasim Basheer, cofounder of Protoship, in a blog post. “It eliminates mundane work like exporting and assembling assets, measuring margins and paddings, tweaking positions to achieve pixel-perfection, DRY-ing up the CSS using mixins, and similar tediums of front-end programming.”
“Instead of treating the output of the visual design step as artifacts disconnected from the underlying code, we want an integrated workflow where we can freely move from design to code and vice versa. This is but a long journey, and we’re doing this one tool at a time,” he wrote.
(Related: Facebook open-sources program that writes other programs)
In addition to Protoship, the company has introduced Protoship Teleport, a tool that allows users to convert an existing website into a Sketch design and use it to build something new.
The solutions are still in early development, and Protoship is looking for developers to be a part of its early private beta.
