Why Svelte is converting TypeScript to JSDoc

Posted on by Mark FeehilyComments Off on Why Svelte is converting TypeScript to JSDoc

#​638 — May 11, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

The JavaScript Ecosystem is Delightfully Weird — There are plenty of examples of how JavaScript is weird but Sam focuses on the why. If you’ve been a JS developer for many years you’ll have seen it go through many phases and morph to fit its environment. Sam paints the big picture, concluding with a talk Dan Abramov gave yesterday called “React from Another Dimension.”

Sam Ruby

The New JS Features Coming in ECMAScript 2023 — The next JavaScript update brings smaller additions familiar from other languages, but there are more significant developments waiting in the wings. 

Mary Branscombe (The New Stack)

Full Stack for Front-End Engineers with Jem Young (Netflix) — Learn what it means to become a well-rounded full-stack engineer with this hands-on video course. You’ll dive into servers, work with the command line, understand networking and security, set up continuous integration and deployment, manage databases, build containers, and more.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Vue 3.3 ‘Rurouni Kenshin’ Released — Named after a popular manga series, the latest release of Vue is focused on developer experience improvements, particular for those using TypeScript.

Evan You

John Komarnicki says ▶️ Vue 3.3’s defineModel macro will change the way you write your components.

Next.js 13.4 Released — Despite the minor version bump, this is a big release for the popular React framework. The new app router and its improved approach to filesystem based routing is now offered as a stable feature, with a new concept of server actions being introduced in alpha as a way to mutate data on the server without needing to create an in-between API layer.

Tim Neutkens and Sebastian Markbåge

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

???? Svelte is converting from TypeScript to JSDoc (example).. sort of. Rich Harris popped up on Hacker News to provide some all important context but the ultimate result will be smaller package sizes and a better experience for Svelte’s maintainers.

React now has official ‘canary’ releases if you want to use newer features than in the stable releases but still be on an officially supported channel.

Newly released Firefox 113 lets you override JS files in its debugger.

No stranger to controversy, Ruby on Rails’s David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) tweeted: ???? “TypeScript sucked out much of the joy I had writing JavaScript.”

RELEASES:

Glint 1.0 – TypeScript powered tooling for Glimmer / Ember templates.

Elementary 2.0 – JS/C++ library for building audio apps.

???? Articles & Tutorials

ES2023’s New Array Copying Methods — The newest ECMAScript spec introduces some new methods on Array that you’ll eventually find useful in your own programs. Phil gives us the tour.

Phil Nash

Private Class Fields Considered Harmful — “As a library author, I’ve decided to avoid private class fields from now on and gradually refactor them out of my existing libraries.” Why? Well, that’s the interesting part..

Lea Verou

▶  I’m Done with React — Going from least-to-most important, the reasons this developer isn’t choosing React for future projects make for interesting watching, particularly if you too are overwhelmed by upheaval in the React world. Solid is one of the alternatives he has warmed to.

Adam Elmore

Constraining Language Runtimes with Deterministic Execution — Explore various challenges encountered while using different language runtimes to execute workflow code deterministically.

Temporal Technologies sponsor

Running JavaScript in Rust with Deno — Deno’s use of Rust makes it a natural choice if you’re building a Rust app and want to integrate a JavaScript engine.

Austin Poor

Regular Expressions in JavaScript — Powerful but often misunderstood, many will benefit from this roundup of the potential regexes offer to JavaScript developers.

Adebayo Adams

How to Measure Page Loading Time with the Performance API — The Performance API is a group of standards used to measure the performance of webapps supported in most modern browsers.

Silvestar Bistrović

How to Build a JS VST or Audio Unit Plugin on macOS — VSTs and Audio Units are both types of audio plugins for audio editing software and they’re usually built in C or C++. This tutorial doesn’t dig into the audio side of things, but more the practicalities of packaging things up to get started.

Chris Mendez

An Introduction to the Bun Runtime — If you’ve not yet played with the newest entrant into the JS runtime space, this is a high level overview.

Craig Buckler

2023 State of the Java Ecosystem

New Relic sponsor

Configuring ESLint, Prettier, and TypeScript Together

Josh Goldberg

DestroyRef: Your New Angular 16 Friend

Ion Prodan

Why Astro is My Favorite Framework

Ryan Trimble

???? Code & Tools

file-type 18.4: Detect the File Type of a Buffer, Uint8Array or ArrayBuffer — For example, give it the raw data from a PNG file, and it’ll tell you it’s a PNG file. Uses magic numbers so is targeted solely at non text-based formats.

Sindre Sorhus

Learn How the Rising Trend of Malicious Packages Can Affect Your Apps — Keep your applications secure with Snyk’s article on the increasing number of malicious OS packages and ways to mitigate these risks.

Snyk sponsor

Livefir: Build Reactive HTML Apps with Go and Alpine.js — Go isn’t a language that often pops up in the context of the frontend, but this is a neat integration between Go on the backend and Alpine.js up front.

Adnaan Badr

JZZ.js: A Developer Friendly MIDI library — For both browsers and Node, JZZ.js provides an abstraction over working with MIDI related concepts. There are many examples, but the easter egg in the top left is our favorite.

Sema / Jazz-Soft

htmlparser2 9.0: A ‘Fast and Forgiving’ HTML and XML Parser — Consumes documents and calls callbacks, but it can generate a DOM as well. Works in both Node and browser.

Felix Böhm

cRonstrue: Library to Convert cron Expressions into Human-Readable Form — Given something like */5 * * * *, it’ll return “Every 5 minutes”. No dependencies.

Brady Holt

Knip: Find Unused Files, Dependencies and Exports in TypeScript Projects — Being Dutch for “snip” is appropriate as Knip can trim away things that aren’t being used in your project.

Lars Kappert

jsPlumb 6.1
↳ Visual connectivity for webapps.

gridstack.js 8.1
↳ Build interactive dashboards quickly.

???? Jobs

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.

Hired

Team Lead Web Development — Experienced with Node, React, and TS? Join us and lead a motivated team of devs and help grow and shape the future of our web app focused on helping millions explore the outdoors.

Komoot

????‍???? Got a job listing to share? Here’s how.

???? Don’t tell Satya Nadella..

Fake Windows 11 in Svelte — This is a cute little side project, and the code is available too. The most common complaint I’ve seen is that it’s actually more responsive than the real Windows.. ???? Be sure to check out both ‘VS Code’ and ‘Microsoft Edge’ in this environment.

Yashash Pugalia

???? Prefer Windows XP? Maybe RebornXP is more for you. Complete with the classic starting up sound!

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Is React a Framework? Software Engineer Answering

Posted on by Mark Feehily0

By definition – React is one of the most popular JavaScript UI libraries nowadays. It comes in second place after jQuery among all web frameworks! React’s popularity has grown rapidly thanks to a simple and declarative API that allows you to build high-performance applications, and that momentum keeps growing. Still, there is often discussion and questioning that React is a framework or library.

Firstly, let’s look what the differents between framework and library? 

The framework belongs to the main() function. It executes some functions, e.g. controlling a collection of windows on the screen. The framework can, in principle, work even if you have not set it up in any way. It does something, e.g. it places an empty window with default widgets. The framework defines the general nature of the program, and your code provides a specific setting. These settings can be very significant, as both a word processor and a spreadsheet can be created using the same framework.

The library is the set of tools used by your code. Your code belongs to the main() and provides the overall structure of the program. A library performs some specific task, such as sending traffic over a network, drawing charts, or something else. The library can do big things, like draw a view of a three-dimensional space full of objects, but only after you tell it about those objects.

The framework can call your code, which in turn calls the library. But your code never calls the framework, except perhaps for system() or exec() functions.

But, is React a Framework? 

We asked our Software Engineers Team for their opinion and they were split into two parts: some maintain the view that React is a library, and others assign it as a Framework. Here are the most outstanding opinions:

From my point of view, React is not a framework, it’s just a library with no specific requirements for project structure. It’s about describing the abstractions of your application, logic, routing, data exchange, and so on. And React simplifies the work with this data, and optimizes the work with it

Anton M. – Software Engineer at Flatlogic.com

From my point of view, React is not a framework, it’s just a library with no specific requirements for project structure. It’s about describing the abstractions of your application, logic, routing, data exchange, and so on. And React simplifies the work with this data, and optimizes the work with it

I know that react calls itself a “library”, and a lot of developers prefer to react to the home page with the title “library”. However, I think that React is more like a framework now, with different targets like web, react native, etc. And the foundation of React is JSX, which is crucial for proper developer experience, and requires a build step, so you can’t just slap a bunch of JSX files into a browser and call it a day. Nowadays when you say “I built this app with React” you don’t mean that you used it on one page or as a modern jquery alternative. You mean that you built everything around react, with its ecosystem, its best practices, etc. And with all those points in mind, I’d rather call react the framework, than a library

Viktor S. – Staff Engineer at Flatlogic.com

We also conducted the research among others software engineers and would like to share with you the most impressive arguments on this point. 

So, is React a Framework or a Library?

React is a Library

React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. It is maintained by Facebook and a community of individual developers and companies. React can be used as a base in the development of single-page or mobile applications.

Now Why Library, not a Framework?

different definitions for library and framework:

a framework is a software where you plug your code into
a library is a software that you plug into your code

In terms of this definition, React is a framework. But some people, especially in the frontend world, say a framework has to bring stuff like routers and/or widgets, etc. 

So Angular, and ExtJS are frameworks, but React isn’t, because it only gives you the means to build components and render them into the DOM.

Let’s make it simple, in React we have to include packages for everything it’s not necessary but yes we can add them, thus React is a Library but if we are not given an option to do so with our code then that’s a framework like Angular and Vue.

React is a library because it’s only supposed to deal with the view part of the eco-system, and you can integrate it easily in any project you’re working on currently, it’s something like jQuery, it only helps you with organizing your views into reusable components, of course, the performance is one of the best things about React, especially with the new Fiber algorithm, things will be faster seeing the scheduler mechanism, unlike Angular, it’s a framework that gives you everything you need, most of the things are already built-in, for React you need to create your own/or grab some modules from npm to add extra functionality as need per your project.

It depends on how you use it. If you’re writing a small program and you structure your program around working with React, you are probably thinking of React as a framework.

If you have a big program and you use React as a small part of it just for handling output, then you’re probably thinking of React as a library.

If your program is 90% user interface, and not only your program structure but your data structures are shaped to fit the React system, then you may even think of React as a language. Hey, if TypeScript can be a language, why not React?

React is a library, cause it has mostly evolved into a vast ecosystem that is barely distinguishable from a framework. A framework protects the edges, whereas a library provides a tool for doing certain tasks. React handles exactly one task: abstracted Web Components. It offers an internal state, lifecycles, and external properties, as well as a renderer for a browser or comparable environment through ReactDOM – and nothing more.

This has a few advantages: it is smaller than a full-featured framework, has fewer opinions on how to address problems, and so provides more options.

I’d say React is a library posing as a framework. It feels like working in a framework (esp. with JSX, though using that is optional), but under the hood, it is just a library. This definition is quite good:

a framework is software that you plug your code into (e.g. you work “inside” it).
a library is software that you plug into your code (e.g. you “hand-off” certain tasks to it, or build “on top” of it).

React feels like the first, but is the second. The attached video compares React and Angular and hints at the distinction. Since React treats your code as a black box, you can push the data-binding concerns out to the edges of your system, to be “handed off” to React (i.e. how you would use a library). Angular, on the other hand, forces you to work “inside” their “scopes” using their “directives” to handle data-binding. In Angular, you are passing your data through scopes that observe your data model. You are always at the mercy of whichever directives they are building into their framework scaffolding. You are also working “inside” HTML (JS-in-HTML), with all the constraints that impose (giving more of a framework feeling). But with React, you have less of that feeling, since you have freedom (full power of JS), and can build “on top” of React (HTML/JSX-in-JS). This is good since JS is inherently more powerful than HTML.

React is a Framework

React is a framework. Honestly caring about the difference between a library and a framework is a bit pedantic, so I’d say you can call it either. Having said that, my definitions of the two words are that a library is a collection of functions, and a framework is a way of doing things.

By this definition, React is a framework because it forces you to build UI in the React way instead of the Angular, etc. On the other hand, the dash is a perfect example of a library because it’s just a collection of functions, use them however you want.

JavaScript is known for its abundance of new plugins, frameworks, and other things created by its massive community of developers and designers.

You must be wondering what this fact has to do with the React JS framework and other frameworks. The truth is that many of the leading IT firms have already embraced JavaScript and leveraged its benefits.

That should answer the question and not cause any other debates, right? Well, not exactly; the debate over “Is React a framework or library?“ is as strong as ever.

Over the years, developers, software engineers, and developer communities came up with pros and cons related to the status of React as a library or React as a framework. Let’s analyze them together.

React as a library

React can be easily swapped by some other javascript library offering similar functionalities.
React can be easily plugged into an existing technology stack – and that’s the definition of a library.

React as a framework

Related libraries must work in an opinionated way.
Because of its state and lifecycle on the components, you inverted the control to React.

Are you asking why React was designed as a library and not a framework [1] or why it is classified as a library and not a framework [2]?

[1] Why it was built that way. A library is something you can add to an existing project to enhance it. It does not impose any restrictions or conventions on your application design and you can supplement it with other libraries of your choice to flesh out your application. There is also a shorter learning curve (usually) on a library as you can add it incrementally to your project. A framework on the other hand implies structure and convention, you need to follow the conventions of the framework. In many cases a framework limits you to working within these conventions – you cannot (or it is difficult) to mix a framework with other code.

There are use cases for each.

[2] Why it is not classified as a framework. Based on the definition of a framework it does not fit the bill – it is a library that is added to your code – it does not impose structure – beyond the use of the library itself and it can be mixed in with other code.

React does not solve any structural or architectural problems on the app level. It provides us with a set of methods for better (in my opinion) handling of the front-end. I remember when jQuery did that back in the day, and how that started the revolution… React is now doing the same, just better.

Because React is a library eventually we got Flux and Redux. Both of them are handling real-world problems that come alongside Scaling. Mare library does not think about that.

React is a framework because Redux is referencing it as one (Source). Ah, as I started to hope that something in life is going to be easy. With React and Redux there is a clear layer of separation between the view and data. That is why React is not a complete framework to solve the entire problem.

Conclusion

Soft engineers spend a lot of time talking about what React is. The answer is important for any React soft engineer, no matter their skill level. That is because it indicates what they should know and how they should work when developing any React application. Depending on who you are, a beginner or an advanced React soft engineer, I hope this thoughtful research will improve your development process as you build your next React project.

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Vue Material Admin Update

Posted on by Mark Feehily0

Right after we have updated React Material Admin we also do the same with Vue Material Admin.

What products are affected by the update?

The update was released on 3 products:

Vue Material Admin Full
Vue Material Template Node.js
Vue Material Laravel Template

What has changed?

The main changes are in updated dependencies. We also updated the version of Vuetify as the Vue Material Admin based on it. So here is the list of main updates:

✅ amcharts/amcharts4: 4.10.22 -> 4.10.25
✅ amcharts/amcharts4-geodata: 4.1.22 -> 4.1.23
✅apexcharts: 3.29.0 -> 3.35.3
✅ axios: 0.23.0 -> 0.27.2
✅ core-js: 3.19.0 -> 3.22.7
✅ moment: 2.29.1 -> 2.29.3
✅ vue-router: 3.5.2 -> 3.5.3
✅ vue-apexcharts: 1.6.0 -> 1.6.1
✅ vuetify: 2.5.10 -> 2.6.6

So the Vue Material Admin is up-to-date and we would be really happy if you choose it for your future projects. You don’t need to spend your time updating all those technologies by yourself, so you can focus on developing business features.

Moving forward and Summing Up

We will be constantly updating all of our Vue templates as new libraries will release. And for sure sometime release one of our templates on Vue 3.

For the rest of our Vue templates, check our marketplace. If you face any difficulties setting up this or that template or admin dashboard, please feel free to leave us a message on our forum, Twitter or Facebook. We will respond to your inquiry as quickly as possible!

Happy coding!

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What is Material UI

Posted on by Mark Feehily0

Introduction

Material-UI (MUI) is a CSS framework that provides React components out-of-the-box and follows Google’s Material Design launched in 2014. MUI makes it possible to use different components to create a UI for a company’s web and mobile apps. Google uses Material Design to guarantee that no matter how users interact with the products they use, they will have a consistent experience. Material Design includes guidelines for typography, grid, space, scale, color, images, etc. And it also allows designers to build deliberate designs with hierarchy, meaning, and a focus on results.

The MUI library for React has over 76k stars on GitHub and is one of the most improved UI libraries. You can build an incredibly stylish application in a short amount of time with pre-styled components, as well as tune and expand these components according to your needs. It is based on Leaner Style Sheets (LESS), a CSS development extension.

You can also install the MUI into your application using yarn:

yarn add @material-ui/core

or npm:

npm i @material-ui/core

Why use Material UI?

Here are the reasons why developers prefer to integrate MUI into their applications:

Pre-designed UI components. MUI supplies multiple pre-designed components from which you easily approach and attach to your application, enabling an attractive, easy-to-use, and visually engaging design and rapid implementation. 

Material Design. Material Design is a well-thought-out design system that describes the value and use cases of components. With Material Design, for example, you can use the Material Icons, meaning choosing icons that match your design system.

Adjustable theme. MUI provides simple installation and adjustment themes to use and globally implement for all components available to you, making it a highly functional and dynamic experience. By doing so, the theme color of the component, information about the palette, and surface properties, and some other styles can be customized, meaning that all your components can be consistent.

Well-structured documentation. MUI has clearly understandable and well-structured documentation, which includes guides with code examples to practice with.

Widespread support. MUI has great support for fixing bugs and issues, due to its constantly updatable library. In small releases, for all issues found, the team provides fixes. And as a user, you can participate in influencing what additions to the library will be added in the future. The team sends a feedback survey to all library developers every year in order to fix any issues and make the Material UI more usable, also you can tweet them feedback on the official account: @MaterialUI.

Community. Here you can find basic links with support and examples of using the MUI.

Who uses Material UI and its integrations?

Node.js, React, Next.js, Emotion, and etc, represent some of the most popular tools that are integrated with Material-UI. About 214 companies use Material UI in their technology stacks, here are some of them:

UNIQLO
Medium
Scale
Frontend
Google
SkyQuest Tech Stack

How to create your Material UI React application using the Flatlogic Platform

There are two ways to build your application on the Flatlogic Platform: 

Create a simple and clear frontend application, generated by the CLI framework, 

or

Build a CRUD application with frontend+backend+database.  

Creating your CRUD application with Flatlogic

Step 1. Choosing the Tech Stack

In this step, you’re setting the name of your application and choosing the stack: Frontend, Backend, and Database.

Step 2. Choosing the Starter Template

In this step, you’re choosing the design of the web app. Here you can find the Material Template for your application.

Step 3. Schema Editor

In this part you will need to know which application you want to build, that is, CRM or E-commerce, also in this part you build a database schema i.e. tables and relationships between them.

If you are not familiar with database design and it is difficult for you to understand what tables are, we have prepared several ready-made example schemas of real-world apps that you can build your app upon modification:

E-commerce app;
Time tracking app;
Books store;
Chat (messaging) app;
Blog.

Afterwards, you can deploy your application and in a few minutes, you will get a fully functional CMS for your React Application with Material Design.

Suggested Articles:

What is Angular – Flatlogic Tech Glossary
What is Webpack – Flatlogic Tech Glossary
How to Create a Vue Application [Learn the Ropes!]

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Bootstrap vs. Material-UI. Which One to Use for the Next Web App?

Posted on by 0

Bootstrap or Material UI – the age-old question everyone has asked yourself at least once. Without a long introductory we want to present a short table with main conclusions on each criterion of the comparison. Those of you who want to know more may read further. 

Enjoy reading!   

A short comparison for those who look for the quick answer

 
Bootstrap
Material UI

What is?

CSS, HTML, JS framework for developing responsive websites

React UI framework that follows Material Design principles

Who is the developer?

Twitter

Material design – Google, Material UI – unnamed team.

Where / whom is used?
Airbnb, Dropbox, Apple Music, Twitter, Coursera, Bloomberg
Nasa, Amazon, Unity, Google and all its products, JPMorgan

Grid system
12-column grid system, that provides a fully responsive design
12-column grid system, that provides a fully responsive design

Information layout

The grid system is both for mobile and desktop (mobile-first) with clear and readable UI for all platforms.
Mobile-first and very user-friendly, but UI can be overwhelming with animated interactions for desktop.

Dependencies

Bootstrap-based apps are quite heavy and may be slow if you do not devote time to get rid of unnecessary components and JS scripts

Material UI is only React based. Material design in pure CSS without any third-party libraries

The speed of development
High speed of development thanks to its’ reusable code
The development speed is less than bootstrap offers, but can be increased by using templates

Customization
Provides consistency in user experience and interface everybody is familiar with, average opportunities to customization

Low consistency in user experience since designers create hundreds of different UI. Provides unique easy customizable design

A Detailed Comparison 

Common Information

Bootstrap is a powerful CSS, HTML,  JS framework that helps to create responsive web applications. It’s the most popular framework for building apps both for mobile and desktop. The original name is Twitter Blueprint because Bootstrap was developed by the Twitter team as an internal framework. The first release as an open-source project was on August 19 in 2011. The main goal of that framework was to make developers’ lives easier and to encourage consistency across internal tools. Such apps like Airbnb, Dropbox, Apple Music, Twitter, Coursera, Bloomberg are built on top of Bootstrap.

In Flatlogic we create web & mobile application templates built with React, Vue, Angular and React Native to help you develop web & mobile apps faster. Go and check out yourself!
See our themes!

Material UI is a React UI framework that follows principles of Material design. Material UI is based on Facebook’s React framework and contains components that are made according to Material guidelines. Material design was developed by Google in 2014 while Material UI was developed by a small, dedicated, and passionate team in 2017. The first beta version of Material UI on GitHub was released on June 23 in 2017. The first running version dates from 2018 according to the official website. Material UI is strongly connected with Material design, but you shouldn’t confuse the two. Material UI is just a react component library without Material design, that’s why we built our comparison from the perspective of the fact that Material guidelines go first, Material framework follows. Google uses Material Design in all its products, Material UI is used by Nasa, Amazon, Unity, JPMorgan, etc. 

Grid System

Bootstrap grid is a flexible and fully responsive mobile-first grid system that uses containers, rows and columns to help the app adapt to any screen. Rows and columns are combined to create 1 or more containers. A bootstrap grid system is a twelve-column system that has a range of rules to follow, like rows are only used to create columns, there must be no content inside the row, only columns can be immediate children of rows, and others (read more here).

Material Designs’ responsive UI is based on twelve columns grid layout. Column width is flexible, while gutter widths that form the space between content are fixed values in the range between 0 and 10px. Margin widths that separate the content from the left and right screen borders are also defined as fixed values. Gutter and margin widths can be either equal or not. Grid system adopts when the screen size reaches some predetermined values that are called “breakpoints”. When that happens, the layout adjusts to the screen and changes the number of columns where the app places its content. That provides developers and users with a fully responsive UI. 

Information Layout

Bootstrap is a system of how the information is organized and presented. And we put the major emphasis on the word “information” because apps like Twitter, Coursera, Apple music were developed with minimalistic design with soft colors, bold and big headlines, little or no animation. People visit these websites not to enjoy fancy buttons or smooth and bright animation, but to get information as fast and easy as possible. Bootstrap offers that opportunity with a minimum amount of distractions and provides clear and readable UI and thank it for that!  

Check out React Material UI Admin Node.js!

PostgreSQL integrated. No jQuery and Bootstrap!

Material design was primarily made for mobile. Mobiles have smaller screens and as a result, less space to place elements and information – the solution from Material UI is animation, layers, sliders, pop-ups. Mobiles don’t have a pointer, but users need to understand where they touch on a touch screen – here animated feedback of touch from the app goes. Immediate feedback is necessary for mobiles, but for what reason can you use all this click-get-feedback animation for the web? Animation makes the user experience better and looks cool indeed, but if you use some app daily (for example, for work) this nice-looking smooth animation can be overwhelming. It’s quite easy to make the app look incredible with Material UI, but a nice-looking design doesn’t always meet the users’ needs.

Dependencies

Bootstrap is not a simple framework. The package contains tons of features and a big code with a lot of scripts, a large number of CSS classes, and jQuery dependency. That leads to problems with performance, the huge size of the app, battery draining, page speed. It’s possible to avoid the consequences of the Bootstrap framework if you devote time (quite a lot) and get rid of components that are not used in your app. Then you will get a lightweight working app. The Bootstrap team of developers is also progressing that way and we expect them to remove jQuery from Bootstrap 5. This may seem good news to the community, but don’t forget that removing the largest client-side dependency isn’t a fast task to accomplish. More than a year has passed since that announcement, the release date was in early 2020 first, now it’s predicted somewhere in late 2020d. Our team is waiting for it.

Material UI is a set of React-based components. Components can be used independently from each other, which means you have in your app only styles for components that the app uses.  Material UI is pure css and doesn’t require any library to work. You get only what you need and want to use. 

Customization

From the perspective of customization, we can compare Bootstrap and Material UI as consistency vs uniqueness. Why so?

As we have mentioned in the first paragraph, Bootstraps’ developers wanted to provide consistency in experience both for developers and users. To be honest, they have succeeded. If you look at several dozen apps that are based on Bootstrap, you will see the same things in the same places with little differences. Material UI is based on Material guidelines. And Material guidelines are rules and principles for motion, interaction, animation, building navigation, typography, shapes, colors, etc. You shouldn’t follow them all, you must instead combine them, and don’t forget that your design must fit the content it displays so the user experience becomes better. But there is no one-size-fits-all solution for every web app, there is a set of rules (Material guidelines) that helps a designer to create a modern and stylish interface that will be unique. That leads us to the problem, when we use 100s of different UIs and every time we open a new app created by a Material design dedicated designer, we meet the situation like “Erm… Where am I supposed to click?” There is no consistency of experience, but there is a space for creativity. 

The Speed of Development

As we mentioned before, Bootstrap goes with many UI components, like typography, tables, buttons, navigation, labels, alerts, tabs, etc. It provides enough necessary elements to build a good-looking design with modest efforts and allows developers to concentrate on the functionality of the app. Furthermore, there are a lot of themes and templates to download on the web. That results in high development speed.  

Material UI provides developers with material-based UI components. They help to decrease the amount of time that is needed for design and app development. But since Material UI is mostly a set of UI components, it doesn’t offer such a great boost to the development speed as Bootstrap does. If you want to improve development speed significantly, it’s better to use material templates.

For Those Who Want to Use Them Both 

Is it possible to take advantage of them both? To enjoy stylish responsive design without a lot of time spent adopting the app for different resolutions?

Yes, it’s possible with Material Design bootstrap (that is also called MDbootstrap). It is a set of libraries built on top of bootstrap and other popular frameworks like Vue, Angular, React and follows Material design guidelines. That combo allows developers to use close-to-bootstrap syntax that everybody is familiar with, so there will be fewer problems while developing. A list of MDbootstrap for different frameworks you can find here.

That is not know-how, MDbootstrap goes with a large number of tutorials, free and premium templates, a friendly community, and long history (almost since that day when Material Design has gone from being an idea to the real guidelines). 

That’s all. Thanks for reading. 

Create your Material-UI or Bootrstrap app with Flatlogic’s Full Stack Web App Generator

At Flatlogic we have built a development platform that simplifies the creation of web applications – we call it Web App Generator. The tool allows you to create the CRUD app in minutes, you just need to choose the stack, design, and define the database model with help of an online interface and that is all. Moreover, you can preview generated code, push it to your GitHub repo and get the generated REST API docs. Try it for free!

Here is a quick guide on how to do the full-stack web app based on Material-UI with help of Flatlogic Generator.

Step №1. Choose your projects name

Any good story starts with a title, any good React App starts with a name. So, summon all of your wit and creativity and write your project’s name into the fill-in bar in Flatlogic’s Full Stack Web App Generator.

Step №2. Select your React Material-UI App Stack

At this step, you will need to choose the frontend, backend, and database stack of your app. And, to correlate with our illustrative React App, we will choose here React for the frontend, Node.js for the back-end, and MySQL for the database.

Step №3. Choose your React App Design

As we’ve already mentioned, design is quite important. Choose any from a number of colorful, visually pleasing, and, most importantly, extremely convenient designs Flatlogic’s Full Stack Web App Generator presents. But in our case if you want to built Material-UI you need to choose “Material” design, otherwise it will be build with React and Bootstrap.

Step №4. Create your React App Database Schema

You can create database model with UI editor. There are options to create custom tables, columns and relationships between them. So, basically you can create any type of content. Moreover, you will receive automatically generated REST API docs for your application.

Step №5. Review and Generate your React App

In the final step, just to make sure everything is as you want it to be, you can review all of the previously made decisions and click the “Create Project” button. After a short time to generate, you will have at your fingertips a beautiful and fully functional React Node.js App. Voila! Nice and easy!

Try it for free!

You might also like these articles:

jQuery vs JavaScript. Why we Removed jQuery From our Templates?
20+ React Developer Tools to Increase Your Programming Productivity
Angular vs React: Which One to Choose for Your Web App

The post Bootstrap vs. Material-UI. Which One to Use for the Next Web App? appeared first on Flatlogic Blog.