The Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) premier event, HPE Discover, is just around the corner, and the HPE DEV & Design team members are busy preparing their sessions for the HPE Hack Shack. Everyone is excited to interact with event attendees and share ideas and helpful hints on how to simplify and improve the software development and design process for today’s applications. A large part of what the group has to offer centers around a specific open source UI development and design tool called [Grommet.] (https://v2.grommet.io/) Grommet is a React-based library of reusable UI components that help developers and designers create web applications. This open source UI development and design tool simplifies the way web applications are built by providing a package of commonly used interface elements from which developers and designers can choose to use.

If you were to walk the HPE Discover show floor and stop by the HPE Hack Shack (DEMO403), you would notice the visual incarnation of Grommet – a purple, gremlin-like character the team endearingly refers to as Stack, the Grommet mascot. You will find him on stickers, posters, slide presentations, large promotional screens, etc. What you might not immediately notice is how Grommet, the UI tool itself, permeates not just this booth, but also other areas of the show floor.

For instance, Grommet is the subject of numerous workshops and Hack Shack Challenges. Several of the HPE Design Workshops feature Grommet, including:

HSW8625 HPE Design Workshop – User experience research tools and techniques that drive customer experience.
Tuesday, June 18 at 4:30pm.
Thursday, June 20 at 9:00am.
Learn how insights from user experience research and design can improve the outcome of your product roadmap using a multi-disciplinary approach to UX research and design strategy.

HSW8593 HPE Design Workshop – Tools that help your customers and partners build amazing experiences.
Wednesday, June 19 at 12:00pm.
See all the resources available to you through the HPE Design team. They will walk through the hpe.design website and share tips and tricks   you can use to create world-class experiences.

HSW8623 Hack Shack Workshop – Learn about HPE’s most popular open source library, Grommet, a class-leading React based UI/UX framework.
Wednesday, June 19 at 2:00pm.
Are you ready to turn stunning designs into pixel-perfect accessible web applications? Learn how you can start using Grommet to build class-leading web applications.

Hack Shack Challenge -- You’ve heard of soup to nuts. Now, join us for a napkin to template challenge,. Tuesday, June 18 – Thursday, June 20.
This challenge runs throughout the event and shows how easy it is to code in Grommet. Participants start off sketching out their ideas on a napkin and then, using a template project, develop that idea into a publishable UI. The fun part is that you don’t have to be an expert coder or designer. Even beginners are welcome to try their hand at coding and compete for cool prizes.

Some of less obvious places you’ll find Grommet is where it runs behind the scenes. Grommet powers the Leaderboard that displays the Hack Shack Attack game results. This is where passersby can see who is currently in line to win the grand prize that will be given out at the awards reception on Wednesday 5– 6pm in the Hack Shack. The website that houses each session presentation .pdf, which enables attendees to download and take the information home with them, is also powered by Grommet. Even the team’s own HPE DEV and HPE Design websites run with Grommet.

It’s also interesting to note that the technologies presented at HPE Discover, HPE OneView, HPE Nimble storage, HPE SimpliVity, and HPE Composable Fabric, were all developed using Grommet. A special demo presented elsewhere on the show floor, (DEMO1409) The data gold rush: Trapped at the edge today, Swarm Learning is how we’re mining for data intelligence tomorrow, was also developed using Grommet. In this demonstration of AI (artificial intelligence), event attendees will learn how training edge devices may be more effective than the current method where machines are trained at the core and only reference the edge for data and insights.

If you are going to the HPE Discover event in Las Vegas, June 18-20, take a close look around the HPE DEV & Design Hack Shack and see how many times you can find Grommet. For developers and designers who’d like to understand more about how Grommet can provide significant benefits, seek out developer support through the HPE Developer Community Program and consider joining the HPE DEV community.