Bootstrap

16 Aug 2015

I was at college graduation when I’ve been introduced to (then Twitter’s) Bootstrap. Half-passed course grade and I was almost there. I had a course on Web Software Development fundamentals in the 3rd year of grad, first semester of 2011.

Rails bandwagon was in its full hype over here, but I still was learning HTML/JS basics with a few bits of PHP web scripting. But it was a great new world to me (by the way, something in me was not so kind to web development and design at that time).

In the next semester, I engaged on a extra-class initiative to learn a web framework (Grails) with some friends, fueled by one of our lecturers which was kind of evangelizing that technology to us, since he thought it was cool. Grails (this could be more detailed in another post) is a web framework for a JVM-based language, Groovy. That was the meeting point to get to know Bootstrap as it really is. Seriously.

From that time, I’ve seen a huge wave of websites (most of them tech-driven) with some sort of special theming. Once I opened Groovy language website, that really grabbed my attention (recovered this link from The Wayback Machine).

I was impressed. And for that, I wanted to know the name for that “cool website template”. So I went over the page’s source code, digging through those elements’ styles and I could find out that it came from a Bootstrap CSS file. Everything has changed.

I was pretty fine with jQuery UI’s theming and GUI widgets, but then it came Bootstrap’s awesome support to responsiveness, an evolution to 960 grid system, and its cool native components with trendsetting design guidelines.

I couldn’t have the chance to use it in the actual projects I’ve been in later in some jobs. JSF still was a thing with those bunch of -Faces UI frameworks. But Bootstrap was uprising. I finally got to work with it full time in early

1. It was a Struts 2 MVC based project, but using Bootstrap 2 as an UI toolkit. That was incredible.

I know today we got so many options for CSS frameworks… Pure, Semantic, Foundation, Bourbon and even Google’s Material Design Lite rendition to web. Even though, Bootstrap is a huge player and is still powering a great amount of web pages and changing the way we see them.

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