Boyo

What is Boyo?

Boyo is an umbrella term meant to reference a group of varying but identifiably related JavaScript, CSS & PHP projects. Those underlying projects are:

• Boyo Core
• Boyo Components
• Boyo Directives
• Boyo Blade
• ...more to come (Boyo Composables, Boyo Behaviors, Boyo Test Utils, Boyo Tailwind, Boyo CSS, Boyo UI...)

Together, the Boyo projects aim to facilitate and assist web developpers when building user interfaces and interactive UIs, whether it be a simple widget or component, or a full blown web app.

The problem, The vision

We web developpers often find ourselves reinvinting common UI patterns, either because the web platform does not provide us with the necessary primitives or because our business or design objectives demands it. However the implementations we end up with are more often than not: incomplete. Whether it lacking the proper accessibility features, keyboard features, has unintuitive interactions, requires heavy use of JavaScript or promotes a complete lock-in into the JavaScript ecosystem.

With Boyo, we want to help alleviate the burdens of making UI components by making available to designers and developers a common set of components and more "general goodies" for building web apps or web pages; no matter the platform's shortcomings, no matter the server side language.

Our vision very much aligns with the Open UI initiative; in fact, our vision is inspired by it.

Goals

The goal of Boyo as a whole is to leverage the web platform as much as possible and fill the gaps where it falls short. Boyo Core sees itself as a JavaScript library for building the missing native HTML elements, with a focus on accessibility and developper experience.

With Boyo, no longer should web developpers ask themself "How to create a dropdown, accordeon or switch button?", "How to do this in a lightweight, declarative, state-driven, reactive, optimized, performant and accessible way?".

What does "Boyo" mean?

Ayiti, Bohio, and Kiskeya (Quisqueya) are names that were used by the Taíno and Arawakan people, who inhabited the current countries of Haïti and República Dominicana, to refer to their island.

As me, creator of the project, was searching for a "max five letter word" to label the project I was working on, + am Haïtien, I settled on using the current haitian creole spelling of the word Bohio. Lastly, I am an instant fan of any word having "yo" in it, my favorites being: yo and YOLO; so Boyo was a perfect fit 🤷🏽‍♂️.