We first introduced Silk UI all the way back in 2015. With that UI Framework, we wanted to offer our customers the opportunity to quickly build applications with interfaces that matched the decade they were built in: clean interfaces, dozens of pre-packaged patterns, and an overall acceleration of the UI building experience. We've heard from customers and developers that because so many best practices were packaged into Silk UI, the framework just allowed them to focus much more on the functionality they wanted to offer rather than the intricacies of manually building good, solid UX and UI.

But, because technology evolves, and new front-end architectures emerge, we eventually introduced an evolution of Silk UI which we dubbed OutSystems UI: it allowed our customers to start reusing many of the interfaces and components on all of their target devices and form factors. At the same time, we evolved the language to support reactive front-end's development paradigms. All these changes implied that both frameworks inevitably had to move into different directions.

As part of our continued efforts to bring innovation to all our customers, we made the decision to discontinue Silk UI. But, while we do it, we want to make sure that none of your current applications will stop working properly. This implies that we need to extend the original supported status removal and deprecation schedule to allow it to correctly run on our new cross-platform Development Environment.

As such, please expect the following changes to Silk UI support levels:

1. Starting July 2022, Silk UI will no longer be supported. 

   • Please expect version 4.1.7 to be its last release 

   • The following components will lose their support status: 

     1. Silk UI Web; 

     2. Dublin Template;

     3. Lisbon Template; 

     4. Liverpool Template;

     5. Vanilla Template.

   • Supporting sites and content will be removed from the web. These include:

     1. The Silk UI microsite

     2. Silk UI’s Documentation

     3. Public facing assets that mention Silk UI, like YouTube videos shared on the official OutSystems account.

2. From the beginning of November 2022 onward, Silk UI will be deprecated, which means new customers are discouraged from installing Silk UI on fresh installations. However, applications currently using Silk UI will continue to work as before.

With these changes, we now encourage all our current customers to consider modernizing their portfolio by adopting Reactive Web applications as their first option for building new applications. As opportunities for evolving  applications built with Traditional Web arise, you should consider the advantages of rebuilding these as Reactive Web applications. We provide a large set of assets to help our customers undergo this transition:

• OutSystems UI - Forge component with all patterns

• OutSystems UI Templates Reactive - to help you get started with rich pre-built templates

• OutSystems UI Style Guide Preview - an overview of the OutSystems proposed Style Guide

• OutSystems UI Reactive Style Guide Template - a template to help you start customizing your own branded Style Guide based on the OutSystems base Style Guide

• OutSystems UI microsite

• Traditional to Reactive migration documentation

• Converting Existing Portfolio to Reactive - webinar on converting full portfolios to Reactive

In order to guide you through these changes we have prepared our services and partners to assist you. 
We are available through the usual channels, so if you want to learn more about what these changes mean, and / or need help with this transition, please contact us through support@outsystems.com or your dedicated Customer Success Organization.

Thank you