The Trowel Project is Over

The first commit was on 31 Aug 2016, a year and half after the Trowel project is officially abandonned and no more maintened.

Why

This project was built on the frustration of historical CSS frameworks patterns that were never customizable enough. This problem exists because of the design of pre-processor variables. Trowel tried to fix this insight proposing a new way to design Sass variables with the best flexibility possible.

After a lot of nights working on it, the Trowel Variable pattern was born. It was quitte a journey because this pattern rely on a lot algorithm and Sass a basic language that does not offer all the features required. But I am proud to say that we overcame the technical challenge faced-off. Trowel-core is the first known Sass library with a Oriented Object pattern, a language feature that does not exist into this technology. Trowel is also the only Sass library that runs unit tests using continuous integration.

But today the CSS Framework are declining. Front-end stacks rely more on javascript for templating and styling web views, which is quitte awesome ! But Trowel are definitely not suited for thoses stacks.

Despite the Trowel variable patterns that works great, some other points made this project not relevant anymore :

• Deep customization makes Trowel variables too big, which creates a pretty ugly developer experience.
• The community is so tiny : Trowel components are used only by a company that decided to walk appart from it, late 2017.
• The Trowel components are pretty painful to create. We tried to make them the simplier possible, but it was not enough for us. The constraints were also too high to make them really suited for any kind of visual component.

Thanks

I want to thank first Marie-Isabelle Goyet who worked on the UI of Trowel since the beginning. She was a great support for me on and off the project, and still is.

Thanks to Paul Andrieux who did not work on the project, but were a good mentor pushing me forward everyday. I am pleased that Trowel helped the company he founded to raise some government grant in a critical period, even if the bigger part of Trowel was built on unpayed work hours.

Thanks to Naomi Hauret who were very enthusiastic about the project and worked on it with a great energy.

And of course thanks to all the users that did manipulate a Trowel variable one day.

Last words

Trowel is still accessible, and you still can fork it on github. You can follow me on twitter and github to find out my next projects.

I hope you enjoy the ride with Trowel.