When starting a new project, UI development often becomes a point of contention. Requirements continue to evolve, and the UI quickly becomes a casualty of constant change.
You’re stuck balancing:
- Quality vs. Performance
- Rapid Application Development (RAD) vs. Flexibility
- Cost vs. Risk
Third-party control libraries can accelerate development, but they introduce several drawbacks:
- ⚠️ Performance bottlenecks
- ⚠️ Privacy and security risks
- ⚠️ Lack of flexibility
- ⚠️ Unpredictable behavior and unintended consequences
On the flip side, building custom controls for every project feels like reinventing the wheel and negatively impacts productivity, RAD, and cost-effectiveness.
That’s exactly why we created our internal UI control library — to strike the perfect balance between speed, flexibility, consistency, and maintainability.
🚀 Why Build an Internal UI Control Library?
In any modern development setup, having a shared library of reusable UI controls drastically improves both developer productivity and end-user experience. It lays the foundation for a sustainable, scalable, and rapid development process.
Let’s explore what this means in practice.
🎛 What Is a “Control”?
A control is a modular, business-logic-agnostic UI component that is:
- ✅ Standalone
- ✅ Reusable
- ✅ Easily configurable
Whether it’s a dropdown, date picker, table, checkbox, or search bar — a control simplifies UI development, promotes consistency, and reduces code duplication.
🔁 1. Reusability & Flexibility
Our controls are:
- Independent of business logic
- Equipped with customizable options
- Universally usable across applications
Instead of recreating basic UI elements for each project, we reuse from our shared library. This ensures that a change in one control (say a dropdown enhancement) reflects across all applications using it — saving time and reducing maintenance overhead.
⏱ 2. Time & Cost Efficiency
Time is money — and reusable controls save both.
For example:
Need a user listing page? Just plug in our TableControl, pass in the column schema and user data, and it renders a feature-rich, interactive table instantly.
No need to re-develop core UI features again and again. This also encourages uniform patterns throughout the application, reducing QA cycles and onboarding time for new developers.
As new requirements emerge, we either extend existing controls or inherit and override base functionality, enabling fast, modular development.
🎨 3. Consistent UI/UX
User experience thrives on consistency.
By using the same controls throughout applications:
- Visual consistency is maintained
- UX patterns remain predictable
- Accessibility and standards compliance becomes simpler
You implement UX best practices once — in the control — and every application that uses it benefits instantly.
🛠 4. High Maintainability
Code maintainability is a top concern, especially for long-lived applications. With a control-based architecture:
- You update logic in one place
- Fix bugs once and deploy universally
- Implement new features by enhancing a single control
Example: Need to add column filters to all data grids? Update the grid control — and every implementation gets upgraded automatically.
This component-level encapsulation significantly reduces technical debt.
✅ The Bottom Line
A control-based UI approach empowers your development team to build highly interactive, cost-effective, and easily maintainable applications. It streamlines collaboration, enforces standards, and accelerates the overall development lifecycle.
At the end of the day, we’re not just writing code — we’re building systems that scale. Our internal UI control library is a major step toward that vision.