This journal launched with the first Cotomy release and serves as the starting point for understanding the ideas behind the framework. Rather than a feature log, it serves as a public record of design decisions: how we build systems and websites with Cotomy, and why we choose each approach.
What Cotomy Is
Cotomy is not a general frontend framework and not a SPA replacement. Its primary domain is business applications, where form handling and data integrity define the real cost of change.
Its core idea is a DOM-first UI runtime for long-lived business applications.
Why It Exists
Modern UI frameworks evolved around rendering efficiency and state management, but the hardest problems in business systems live elsewhere: input, validation, contracts, and consistency over time.
Cotomy centers that reality. UI is the surface. The structure below it is a form runtime and a data contract that remain stable under long-term operation.
Business UI systems live for years, sometimes decades. Their hardest problems are architectural, not visual. This journal treats those decisions as first-class knowledge.
The Vision
The goal is not to create another framework. The goal is to make it possible for small teams to build and maintain large business systems, and to prepare a design model that AI-assisted development can reason about directly.
The vision is to help small teams build large systems, favor design-first development over implementation-first delivery, provide AI-ready design units, and keep foundations sustainable even as framework trends shift.
What This Journal Will Cover
This journal covers Cotomy design philosophy, the UI runtime model, structural problems in business UI, and architecture boundaries across the system.
Where to Start
If you are new to Cotomy, the following reading order provides the best overview of the ideas behind the framework.
1. Problem Series — Why these problems exist
These articles explain the structural problems in long-lived business UI systems and why Cotomy focuses on form runtime design.
Example topics include:
HTML and CSS boundaries, form submission as a runtime protocol, screen lifecycle and DOM stability, and UI intent and business authority separation.
Start here if you want to understand the motivations behind the framework.
2. Design Series — Core architecture decisions
The design series explains the architectural model behind Cotomy, including:
CotomyElement boundaries, page lifecycle coordination, form runtime design, and inheritance and composition choices.
These articles describe how the framework is structured internally.
3. Practical Series and Usage Series
These articles show how the runtime concepts appear in actual code.
The Practical series focuses on screen-level construction patterns, while the Usage series explains individual Cotomy APIs and runtime behavior.
They focus on:
CotomyElement usage, CotomyPageController patterns, API integration, and runtime behavior in real screens.
They are useful once you want to start experimenting with Cotomy.
Some articles document how the ideas behind Cotomy evolved through real development work.
These posts describe the practical experiences that shaped the framework.
Learn More
Official site: https://cotomy.net
npm package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/cotomy
