A React-based framework for building data-intensive applications in no time

refine

refine is a React-based framework for building data-intensive applications in no time sparkles It ships with Ant Design System, an enterprise-level UI toolkit.

refine offers lots of out-of-the box functionality for rapid development, without compromising extreme customizability. Use-cases include, but are not limited to admin panels, B2B applications and dashboards.

View Demo View Github

Key features

⚙️ Zero-configuration: One-line setup with superplate. It takes less than a minute to start a project.

? Out-of-the-box : Routing, networking, authentication, state management, i18n and UI.

? Backend Agnostic : Connects to any custom backend. Built-in support for REST API, GraphQL, NestJs CRUD, Airtable, Strapi, Strapi GraphQL, Supabase and Altogic.

? Native Typescript Core : You can always opt out for plain Javascript.

? Decoupled UI : UI components are exposed directly without encapsulation. You have full control on UI elements.

? Powerful Default UI : Works seamlessly with integrated Ant Design System. (Support for multiple UI frameworks is on the Roadmap)

? Boilerplate-free Code : Keeps your codebase clean and readable.

Motivation

Higher-level frontend frameworks can save you a lot time, but they typically offer you a trade-off between speed and flexibility.

After many years of experience in developing B2B frontend applications and working with popular frameworks, we came up with a new approach to tackle this dilemma. This is how refine is born.

refine is a collection of helper hooks, components and providers. They are all decoupled from your UI components and business logic, so they never keep you from customizing your UI or coding your own flow.

As refine is totally unopinionated about UI and logic, it's strongly opinionated about three parts of your application:

API Networking
State Management
Authentication & Authorization

We believe, these are the most important components of a data-intensive frontend application and should be handled in a robust way by leveraging industry best practices.

refine guarantees you a perfect implementation of these building blocks in your project, so you can focus on your development.

Architecture

refine makes extensive use of hooks as a default way for interacting with your components.
Under the hood, refine relies heavily to React Query for data handling, caching and state management.
Access to external sources and API's happen via providers which are basically plug-in type components for extendibility.

Benchmark

After releasing the first internal versions, we had the chance to migrate some of our React projects to refine.
In addition to shorter development times and overall performance gains, we've measured significant reduction in project size.

refine makes your codebase significantly smaller, by eliminating redundant code such as reducers, actions and unit tests. Below is a size comparison for an example project:

Quick Start

Run the superplate tool with the following command:

npx superplate-cli tutorial

Follow the CLI wizard to select options and start creating your project.

After setup is complete, navigate to the project folder and start your project with:

npm run dev

Your refine application will be accessible at http://localhost:3000.

Replace the contents of App.tsx with the following code:

import React from "react";
import {
    Refine,
    Resource,
    useTable,
    List,
    Table,
    useMany,
    DateField,
} from "@pankod/refine";
import dataProvider from "@pankod/refine-simple-rest";

import "@pankod/refine/dist/styles.min.css";

const App: React.FC = () => {
    return (
        <Refine dataProvider={dataProvider("https://api.fake-rest.refine.dev")}>
            <Resource name="posts" list={PostList} />
        </Refine>
    );
};

export const PostList: React.FC = () => {
    const { tableProps } = useTable<IPost>();

    const categoryIds =
        tableProps?.dataSource?.map((item) => item.category.id) ?? [];

    const { data, isLoading } = useMany<ICategory>({
        resource: "categories",
        ids: categoryIds,
        queryOptions: {
            enabled: categoryIds.length > 0,
        },
    });

    return (
        <List>
            <Table<IPost> {...tableProps} rowKey="id">
                <Table.Column dataIndex="title" title="title" />
                <Table.Column
                    dataIndex={["category", "id"]}
                    title="category"
                    render={(value: string) => {
                        if (isLoading) {
                            return "loading...";
                        }

                        return data?.data.find(
                            (item: ICategory) => item.id === value,
                        )?.title;
                    }}
                />
                <Table.Column
                    dataIndex="createdAt"
                    title="createdAt"
                    render={(value) => <DateField format="LLL" value={value} />}
                />
            </Table>
        </List>
    );
};

export default App;

interface IPost {
    title: string;
    createdAt: string;
    category: ICategory;
}

interface ICategory {
    id: string;
    title: string;
}

Roadmap

☑️ NextJS & SSR support

☑️ Support for more data & auth providers

☑️ Support for more UI frameworks (MaterialUI, Chakra, Spectrum etc.)