Spice.Templates 0.1.0-alpha.2

Spice 🌶, a spicy cross-platform UI framework!

A prototype (and design) of API minimalism for mobile.

The idea is we could build apps in a simple way, in a similar vein as minimal APIs in ASP.NET Core but for mobile & maybe one day desktop:

public class App : Application
{
    public App()
    {
        int count = 0;
    
        var label = new Label
        {
            Text = "Hello, Spice 🌶",
        };
    
        var button = new Button
        {
            Text = "Click Me",
            Clicked = _ => label.Text = $"Times: {++count}"
        };
    
        Main = new StackView { label, button };
    }
}

These "view" types are mostly just POCOs.

Thus you can easily write unit tests in a vanilla net7.0 Xunit project, such as:

[Fact]
public void Application()
{
    var app = new App();
    var label = (Label)app.Main.Children[0];
    var button = (Button)app.Main.Children[1];

    button.Clicked(button);
    Assert.Equal("Times: 1", label.Text);

    button.Clicked(button);
    Assert.Equal("Times: 2", label.Text);
}

The above views in a net7.0 project are not real UI, while net7.0-android and net7.0-ios projects get the full implementations that actually do something on screen.

So for example, adding App to the screen on Android:

protected override void OnCreate(Bundle? savedInstanceState)
{
    base.OnCreate(savedInstanceState);

    SetContentView(new App());
}

And on iOS:

var vc = new UIViewController();
vc.View.AddSubview(new App());
Window.RootViewController = vc;

App is a native view on both platforms. You just add it to an the screen as you would any other control or view. This can be mix & matched with regular iOS & Android UI because Spice 🌶 views are just native views.

Getting Started

Simply install the template:

dotnet new install Spice.Templates

Create the project and build it as you would for other .NET MAUI projects:

dotnet new spice
dotnet build
# To run on Android
dotnet build -f net7.0-android -t:Run
# To run on iOS
dotnet build -f net7.0-ios -t:Run

Of course, you can also just open the project in Visual Studio and hit F5.