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The Test Cabinet The Test Cabinet

Overview

The UI library (@test-cabinet/ui, in packages/ui) is the shared frontend code for The Test Cabinet’s three GUIs — the public site, the web console, and the Tauri app. It exists so those GUIs share one set of components and one definition of the concepts they all render, rather than each re-implementing them.

It is a code-sharing library, not a component itself: it ships no service and runs in no process of its own. Each GUI bundles the parts of it that it needs.

What it provides

Section titled “What it provides”
  • Presentational primitives — the brand-neutral building blocks every GUI uses: the Markdown renderer, the rating badge, panels, the metric tile, the spec/reference accordion, pagination, and the chart wrapper. The site uses these in its gallery; the console uses them in its screens.
  • The runner/reporter console — the full console UI (the Run, Specs, Runs & Review, and Connections screens and the app shell) that the web and Tauri apps both mount. This is shared by those two but not the site.
  • The client interfaces — the BackendClient and WorkerClient interfaces the console is written against, plus the React contexts that supply them. The console depends only on these interfaces; each app provides a transport (HTTP in the web app, Tauri commands in the desktop app) behind them. This is what lets one console serve both apps.
  • The rating model — the Rating tiers and their display metadata, mirroring the reviews model in the core, so every GUI shows ratings identically.

Theming

Section titled “Theming”

The components are themed through a small set of --tcab-* CSS custom properties (a documented token contract with synthwave defaults). Each app supplies its own values: the site maps them onto its existing palette so the moved components render exactly as before, and the console apps can theme themselves independently. No component hard-codes a palette.

Status

Section titled “Status”

Implemented in packages/ui. The site consumes the primitives; the web console consumes the console, the client interfaces, and the primitives. The Tauri app’s adoption of the shared console is the next step (see the Roadmap).