A web component providing an easy-to-use UI that allows users to easily create and edit a Tech Radar without having to directly modify a JSON file. It also adds validation to ensure that your Tech Radar is always in a valid state.

Who created the Tech Radar?

ThoughtWorks created the Tech Radar concept, and Zalando created the visualization that is popular today.

Purpose

Zalando has a fantastic description on their website:

The Tech Radar is a tool to inspire and support engineering teams at Zalando to pick the best technologies for new projects; it provides a platform to share knowledge and experience in technologies, to reflect on technology decisions and continuously evolve our technology landscape. Based on the pioneering work of ThoughtWorks, our Tech Radar sets out the changes in technologies that are interesting in software development — changes that we think our engineering teams should pay attention to and consider using in their projects.

It serves and scales well for teams and companies of all sizes that want to have alignment across dozens of technologies and visualize it in a simple way.

Packages

This is a monorepo containing three packages:

Package	Description
`tech-radar-editor`	The core web component (`<tech-radar-editor>`)
`tech-radar-editor-backend`	Backstage backend plugin for Azure DevOps integration
`tech-radar-editor-backstage`	Backstage frontend wrapper component

Include the Component in Spotify Backstage

Quick Start

Install packages:

# From your Backstage root directory
yarn --cwd packages/app add tech-radar-editor-backstage
yarn --cwd packages/backend add tech-radar-editor-backend

Add config to app-config.yaml:

techRadarEditor:
  organization: my-org
  project: my-project
  repository: my-repo
  filePath: /tech-radar.json     # optional, defaults to /tech-radar.json
  targetBranch: main             # optional, defaults to main

backend.add(import('tech-radar-editor-backend'));

Add the route in your packages/app/src/App.tsx:

import { TechRadarEditorPage } from 'tech-radar-editor-backstage';

// In your routes:
<Route path="/tech-radar-editor" element={<TechRadarEditorPage />} />

That's it! The editor will fetch data from your Azure DevOps repository and allow users to submit changes as pull requests.

Use the Web Component Standalone

In Plain HTML

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
    <title>Tech Radar Editor</title>
    <script type="module" src="./tech-radar-editor.es.js"></script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <tech-radar-editor></tech-radar-editor>
  </body>
</html>

In React

import 'tech-radar-editor';

function App() {
  return <tech-radar-editor></tech-radar-editor>;
}

With a Data URL

Load JSON from a URL on mount:

<tech-radar-editor data-url="https://example.org/tech-radar.json"></tech-radar-editor>

With Inline JSON Data

Pass JSON directly via attribute:

<tech-radar-editor data-json='{"title":"My Radar","quadrants":[],"rings":[],"entries":[]}'></tech-radar-editor>

Web Component Props

Attribute	Type	Default	Description
`data-url`	`string`	`''`	URL to fetch JSON data from on mount
`data-json`	`string`	`''`	JSON string to load directly (bypasses URL fetch)
`hide-title`	`boolean\|string`	`false`	Hide the h1 heading
`hide-export`	`boolean\|string`	`false`	Hide the "Export JSON" button
`hide-json-input`	`boolean\|string`	`false`	Hide the textarea + "Load JSON" button
`hide-json-preview`	`boolean\|string`	`false`	Hide the "JSON Preview" section
`auto-expand-entries`	`boolean\|string`	`false`	Auto-expand the Entries section on load

Custom Events

Event	Detail	Description
`radar-data-loaded`	`{ data: TechRadarData }`	Fired once when data is first loaded
`radar-data-change`	`{ data: TechRadarData }`	Fired whenever the data changes

const editor = document.querySelector('tech-radar-editor');
editor.addEventListener('radar-data-change', (e) => {
  console.log('Updated data:', e.detail.data);
});

Building

pnpm install
pnpm build

To develop the web component with hot reload:

pnpm dev

To publish the packages to npm:

pnpm build
cd packages/tech-radar-editor && npm publish
cd packages/tech-radar-editor-backend && npm publish
cd packages/tech-radar-editor-backstage && npm publish