How to Build Efficient AI-Driven Interfaces with Ant Design X: 0 to 1

❓What is Ant Design X?

In the rapidly advancing world of artificial intelligence, AI-driven interfaces have become an essential trend in software development. Ant Design X is a React UI library that embraces this trend, born in 2024, which adheres to the Ant Design system. It is designed to help developers create AI-powered interfaces easily, making development more efficient and convenient.

Ant Design X integrates smart conversational components and API services, with a rich selection of components and templates, and provides full TypeScript support for comprehensive type safety. This greatly enhances the developer experience and reliability.

Its core advantages are significant, as it is based on the RICH interaction paradigm, offering superior AI interaction experiences, delivering smooth and intelligent services to users. For example, when interacting with an AI customer service system built on Ant Design X, the fluidity and intelligence of the conversation are evident, making the interaction feel as though you are conversing with a human. Its diverse range of components covers a wide array of AI conversation scenarios, whether it’s a chat interface, smart assistant, or other complex AI interaction pages, making it easy for developers to quickly build personalized AI interaction pages.

It is also worth mentioning that Ant Design X can easily integrate with models that adhere to OpenAI’s standards, lowering the development threshold and sparing developers the complexity of model integration. In terms of data flow management, Ant Design X provides powerful capabilities to quickly process and respond to user input, offering strong support for building real-time data interaction applications. It also provides multiple templates, enabling developers to quickly launch LUI application development while supporting fine-grained style customization to meet various scenario-specific needs.

✅Getting Started with Ant Design X

1️⃣Setting up the Environment

Before using Ant Design X, we need to set up the development environment. This mainly involves installing Node.js and npm (Node Package Manager).

Node.js is a JavaScript runtime built on the Chrome V8 engine, enabling JavaScript to run on the server-side, enhancing frontend development capabilities. npm is the package manager for Node.js, used for installing, managing, and sharing project dependencies.

Installation Method

You can easily install and manage Node.js through ServBay’s GUI panel. Here are the steps to install Node.js via the ServBay GUI panel:

1.Open the ServBay GUI panel. 2.Navigate to the Packages section. 3.Select the Node.js version you need. 4.Click the green Install button and wait for the installation to complete.

After installation, open the terminal and type node -v and npm -v. If the version numbers appear, the installation is successful.

2️⃣Project Initialization

After setting up the environment, we can initialize a project based on Ant Design X. Open the terminal, navigate to the directory where you want to create the project, and execute the following commands:

In this command, npx create-react-app my-antd-x-app creates a new React project. The project name my-antd-x-app can be modified to your preference. After creation, navigate to the project directory cd my-antd-x-app, then install the Ant Design X library using npm install @ant-design/x.

After installation, the project directory structure will look like this:

The node_modules folder stores project dependencies, the public folder contains public files like HTML templates and icons, and the src folder is where the source code is located. The package.json file records the project dependencies and scripts.

Next, in src/App.js, import Ant Design X components, for example:

Then, run the project with npm start in the command line, and the browser will automatically open and navigate to http://localhost:3000. You should see a page with an Ant Design X button, indicating that your project is successfully initialized and ready for development.

✍️Practical Guide: Building a Simple AI Application

1️⃣Feature Planning

We plan to build a simple AI-powered text generation application that can generate relevant text content based on a user-provided topic. For example, if the user inputs “travel guide”, the app will generate a simple travel guide, including recommendations for attractions, transportation tips, food recommendations, etc.

To achieve this, we need to define a few key parts: First is the user input module, which will provide a simple input box for the user to easily type in the topic. Next is the text generation module, responsible for calling the AI service to generate the text based on the user’s input. Lastly, we have the result display module, which will present the generated text in a clear and readable way. To enhance user experience, we can add some auxiliary features, such as a loading indicator, to inform the user that the system is processing, avoiding anxiety from long waiting times.

2️⃣Interface Design and Implementation

For the interface design, we follow Ant Design X’s design guidelines and use its provided components to build the application interface.

First, create a basic React component to serve as the layout for the app. In this component, use the Layout component from Ant Design X to structure the page into a header, main content area, and footer. The header will include the application title and a brief description, while the main content area will display the user input field, generate button, and the generated results. The footer can include copyright information or other helpful links.

Next, add the user input field and generate button to the content area. Use the Input component from Ant Design X for the input box and the Button component for the generate button. Add a click event handler to the button to trigger the text generation process.

3️⃣Integrating AI Capabilities

To implement true smart text generation, we need to integrate an AI service into the app. In this example, we assume we’re using OpenAI’s GPT model to generate text (in a real-world application, you’ll need to configure the API key accordingly).

First, install the OpenAI Node.js client library:

Then, import and configure the OpenAI client in your project:

Next, modify the handleGenerate function to call OpenAI’s API to generate the text:

In the above code, the createCompletion method sends a request to OpenAI’s API, where the model specifies which one to use, and the prompt is the topic entered by the user. The max_tokens parameter controls the length of the generated text. After receiving the response, we update the generatedText state and display it to the user.

With these steps, we’ve successfully built a simple AI-based text generation app using Ant Design X, which showcases how Ant Design X can be used in real-world projects and how AI capabilities can be integrated.

🧠Mastering Ant Design X

Customizing Themes

In real-world projects, customizing the theme to fit a brand or business needs is common. Ant Design X allows developers to customize themes in various ways, including adjusting colors, fonts, and styles to give the application a unified and unique visual style.

Ant Design X’s styles are written in Less, and theme customization involves overriding Less variables. The official documentation provides a complete list of Less variables for us to adjust the theme. For instance, if we want to change the global primary color to #1890ff, link color to #1890ff, and success color to #52c41a, we can do the following:

First, create a new file, like theme.less, to store the custom theme variables:

Then, configure webpack to handle Less files by adding or updating the less-loader configuration in vue.config.js or webpack.config.js:

Finally, import the custom theme file in the entry file (e.g., main.js):

Now, when using Ant Design X components, they will apply the custom theme styles. If dynamic theme switching is required, Vue’s reactivity system can be used to update Less variables.

**Performance Optimization ** As the application grows, performance optimization becomes critical. In Ant Design X projects, you can optimize performance using several techniques:

Code Splitting: Break the code into smaller chunks to load only the necessary parts initially, improving load speed. Use Webpack’s splitChunks plugin to achieve this. On-demand Loading: Import only the components you need instead of the entire component library to reduce the size of the bundle. For React projects, use the babel-plugin-import to load components on demand. Component Rendering Optimization: Prevent unnecessary re-renders by using React.memo or shouldComponentUpdate. 💼Summary and Future Outlook

In the future, Ant Design X will continue to evolve by expanding its component library, integrating a wider range of AI models, and enhancing performance for larger applications. As a powerful tool, Ant Design X provides developers with a valuable opportunity to explore and leverage in real-world AI interface development projects. Similarly, ServBay, with its intuitive development environment and seamless integration, complements Ant Design X by offering a streamlined approach to building and deploying AI-powered applications, making it an ideal choice for developers looking to push the boundaries of modern tech development.