Announcing JitBlox 1.0: online visual prototyping of modern web apps

Today I am thrilled to announce the official release of JitBlox 1.0! After countless hours of development and beta testing, JitBlox today leaves the beta stage and is ready for the road ahead.

If you're not familiar with JitBlox, it's an online environment that accelerates the design and prototyping of modern component-based web applications. JitBlox lets you generate working prototypes interactively and without coding, giving you a jump-start on your next web project.

I started building JitBlox in early 2020 because, as a web developer, I needed a tool to build working prototypes without having to master a design tool and without coding: a visual environment that would allow developers - and tech-savvy designers - to quickly build modern web apps using proven design systems and UI widgets.

The result, 4 years later, is an easy way for teams to gather early feedback from customers using realistic prototypes, and to start their next web project with solid source code and UI components that developers are already familiar with.

Join the conversation!

JitBlox is also launching on Product Hunt today, one of the most popular platforms to launch new products. Join the conversation with other early adopters on Product Hunt and get 💰 20% off our Pro plan (for 3 months, or for 1 year with annual payment) before September 27 with the unique promo code.

JitBlox 1.0 features

This milestone is an excellent opportunity to reflect on the results of the countless hours of building, testing and refactoring. Here's a brief rundown of all the features you get today. For a more visual overview, I recommend having a look at the home page.

• A visual drag & drop designer for rapidly building your UI. Copy, duplicate, repeat, re-order, delete or enclose your markup faster than with any HTML editor.
• Create apps using battle-tested UI libraries such as Bootstrap and Material Design, rather than relying on proprietary widgets or error-prone design to code translation.
• An interactive toolbox that lets you configure, preview and insert widgets and layouts with just a few clicks.
• Design with realistic data thanks to built-in modeling capabilities and a mock data editor. Connect your data to your user interface and create loops and other logic - all without coding.
• Property editors for easy configuration of widgets and CSS utilities, so you don't have to dig through documentation or memorize cryptic CSS classes.
• A real time preview of your app - accessible from any device - as well as previews integrated into the component designer and toolbox.
• A single-click download of your app's full source code, and GitHub integration to push your project's source code directly to your GitHub repository.
• A theme editor to customize your application to your own corporate identity.
• Project sharing and collaboration allow others to see or modify your project.

What's next?

We are constantly working on minor enhancements and UX improvements, but the top 4 features we are looking at are:

• Integration of more component libraries, including web components. The Shoelace library is likely to be the first.
• Allow custom component stylesheets for more granular control over your component's CSS.
• Allow custom JavaScript/TypeScript code: allow more complex (e.g., computed) expressions for data binding, event handlers and other functions.
• OpenAPI and JSON schema support: quickly create a data model by importing existing OpenAPI specifications or JSON schemas.

Join the conversation

We encourage you to share your feedback with us, good or bad, by submitting issues or leaving a comment on this post. This will help us improve JitBlox and fine-tune our roadmap, so please let us know what you think.