Box, the company leading in the cloud content management space, has launched Box Elements as a set of open source tools to help developers build new applications using Box Platform. The California-based company already has over 100,000 developers, leveraging its cloud-based offering.
While Elements will eventually include UI, industry-specific app and backend services, Box has begun the action releasing its UI components that are being used by more than 50 million users and 74,000 businesses around the globe. The available components come in pieces including Content Uploader, Explorer, Preview and Picker — all uses Box support along with enterprise-grade security through permissions framework Token Exchange.
“For the first time, we are providing businesses of all sizes with the ability to leverage Box’s best in class user experience in their own applications. Developers will no longer need to spend huge amounts of time and money building content experiences, security and infrastructure services from scratch and can instead focus on building unique experiences for their business needs,” said Jeetu Patel, CSO and SVP of Box Platform.
In the entire UI Element package, the Box Content Uploader provides developers the ability to enable a drag and drop action on their apps, whereas the Content Explorer part helps developers add Box file navigation to their apps. Similarly, the Content Preview piece allows developers to display any of 120 file types within their apps and Content Picker helps developers enable file selecting ability from a Box account.
The UI Elements are available in JavaScript libraries and include React components through NPM. You can access the code from GitHub. Furthermore, there are plans to release additional Elements components in the near future.
Already in use
Notably, the newly released Box UI Elements are not something fresh. Applications including Workplace by Facebook, Pressly and Maxwell have already integrated the same pieces to uplift user experiences for their applications. The Box Platform APIs are also integrated within each UI Element to help businesses tweak the deployment as per their requirements.
And yet we still wait for a Linux sync client.