Is MUI revolutionizing the way we create React applications?
I'm a big fan of UI visual designer tools. Back in the day I used Windows Forms a lot, which is in my opinion one of the most productive frameworks ever created for building Windows desktop applications. No other tool comes close to the visual designer offered by Visual Studio for building UI interfaces, it's just that easy and quick to simply drag and drop components and set up user events like clicking, toggling a checkbox, selecting a value in a dropbox, etc.
That's why you will find many repositories using Windows Forms on my Github account. The speed at which you can create the UI for your desktop applications using this framework is unparalleled. But the amount of tools for building web applications this way is simply lacking. In ny opinion, this is mostly due to the fact that Javascript frameworks are in constant evolution, new UI frameworks are constantly being released, so it's difficult to create these kind of tools when the next big thing is around the corner and you are forced to move to it for your next project. ASP .NET Web Forms was the web counterpart of Windows Forms, but of course that framework is deprecated and not recommended for new projects.
What is MUI and MUI Toolpad?
I'll start explaining what Material is. The Material Design System is a design language and framework developed by Google. It provides guidelines, principles, and components for creating consistent and visually appealing user interfaces across various platforms and devices. MUI is a component library for React that leverages the Material Design System. It was created for developers to easily incoporate Material in their own React applications. It's one of the most popular UI libraries for React, with a hefty community of developers using and developing it, so it's a no brainer to use it if you need to quickly create the UI for your next React project.
And now, with MUI toolpad, their newest low-code application builder, they are looking to speed things up even more when creating React applications. According to their website, with MUI Toolpad you can:
Build scalable and secure internal tools locally. Drag and drop to build UI, then connect to data sources with your own code.
They state that MUI Toolpad is intended for internal tools but it could very well be used for simple CRUD business applications. At the time of writing, MUI Toolpad is in beta so there's a lot of room for growth. Right now the component selection is a bit lacking, but you can implement your own custom components if needed.
As for myself I'll give it a chance and use it as a Windows Forms replacement for my internal tools, and hopefully it will be able to be used for building more complex, production-level applications in the future.
Let us know in the comments below what do you think about MUI Toolpad, have you created an application with it? Do you intend to use it soon?
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