mui-toolpad VS material-ui-docs

This seems to mainly be useful for spinning up quick and dirty internal tools.

But for that use-case, isn't it easier to use something visual and established like Retool (https://retool.com/) or that generates nice react code, like MUI Toolpad (https://mui.com/toolpad/)?

How does it stack up against MUI's Toolpad? (https://mui.com/toolpad/)

All things considered, they seem pretty similar - visual UI to generate React code that works alongside existing codebase, open-source & self-hostable, etc.

- All configuration is stored in local files which you can version-control, edit, and deploy in any way you want.

You can check out our live demo [1]. If you find it useful, you can support us by giving a star on GitHub [2]. We released our public beta [3] this week. We are happy to answer any questions/feedback in the comments.

[1]: https://stackblitz.com/fork/github/mui/mui-toolpad/tree/mast...

[2]: https://github.com/mui/mui-toolpad

[3]: https://mui.com/blog/2023-toolpad-beta-announcement/

- Vercel for hosting, because they take a Git repo and host it for you in a couple clicks and manage everything. Free or cheap ($20/mo) at MVP stage.

- Next.js (Vercel's open-source React framework) will handle frontend tooling, routing, type checking, and linting for you with a single command (`npx create-next-app`). Starting the server is one more command (`next dev`) and your page is up and running.

- For the UI layer, I'd recommend either starting with one of their prebuilt templates (https://vercel.com/templates/next.js) and modifying it as needed

OR using a modern component system like https://mui.com/ or https://ant.design/ or https://chakra-ui.com/ instead of trying to learn and write your own component and JS+CSS code. Using one of these systems will allow you to compose complex apps out of well-made, well-documented, easy-to-use primitives, making it much easier to focus on business needs rather than basic frontend components and infra.

The basic MUI system, for example, is totally free. You can find third-party apps built on top of it (https://mui.com/store/#populars) and pay a one-time license fee to essentially "fork" them, getting a prebuilt working app that you just attach your backend API calls to.

There are also low-code extensions of these frameworks (meaning you start with a GUI, plan out your app that way, but still have access to the source for future advanced changes). Examples are https://mui.com/toolpad/ and https://retool.com/use-case/dashboards-and-reporting

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Is this a lot? Yes and no. React has a learning curve of its own, but it can take the place of having to learn raw HTML and CSS. (Yes, you eventually should know those things for debugging and polishing, but they are largely a level of abstraction below what you really need for a basic MVP).

Once you learn React, its primary value isn't that it's a great language (opinions differ) but that it has a humongous ecosystem of third-party vendors, free open-source libraries (basically any component you might think to build is probably already available on npm), and a wide availability of devs from hobbyists to full-timers.

Others in this topic will suggest going away from Javascript as much as possible (and using things like HTMX or backend-to-HTML solutions like the old days). That's fine, but you lose out on the rich ecosystem of React and Javascript, so you end up having to build more yourself -- which is what you're trying to avoid in your case.

My own 2¢: As someone who grew up with HTML and made websites since the birth of Javascript and CSS, the web has always been messy. It's always been a semi-open ecosystem controlled by a few major companies (whether that's Netscape or Microsoft or Sun or Adobe, or these days Google and Apple), so it very much suffers from design-by-bullying. Whoever is the power player of the decade gets to add their favorite technologies that everyone else is forced to adopt. Thus the web became a hodgepodge of document markup systems poorly fitted for modern apps, with various hacks on top of hacks built to satisfy some big company or another's in-house needs. Sadly, that means going "vanilla HTML+JS" doesn't leave you with much, just the shattered legacy of poor historical decisions.

React at least helps by encouraging componentization and abstraction of UI elements to functions, using cleaner data models (actual variables and objects) vs direct DOM manipulation (storing page content as state).

We've gone through many generational shifts in approach, from the raw HTML days of Geocities to the you-build-it, we-host-it approach of Godaddy and its ilk, to the "all in one" CMSes like Wordpress or Drupal. These days, (if you want there to be), there can be a pretty clear separation between backend and frontend systems, and with that specialization came a bunch of startups (mentioned above) whose approach is "let us help you build it as best as we can, so you can focus on business logic instead of basic UI and infra". After 20 years of doing this, the current state of the web developer experience is actually my favorite so far. HTML and CSS suck for building apps (as opposed to documents), and although Javascript is a lot better since ECMAscript v6 (ES6), it is still inextricably tied to the DOM (and thus HTML elements) unless you use an abstraction like React.

It's the difference between writing something like:

```

We at MUI have been working on an open-source drag-and-drop React app builder. Link to the landing page: https://mui.com/toolpad/ This week we have published an interactive demo as well. You can check out the repo here.

I'll be using Material UI for styling the cards. You can install it by visiting the Material UI installation guide.

For the UI, MUI is a huge time saver. It's open-core and thoroughly excellent: https://mui.com/

They also have a lot of pre-built dashboards that tie into various cloud vendors (typically not FOSS though).

(My opinion only, please treat it as just one person's thought process, not some eternal truth)

As a frontend dev, for me it's primarily just an ecosystem thing. There's nothing wrong with HTMX or any other solution, like Ruby on Rails or Hotwire or even other JS frameworks like Angular or Gatsby, but they are not really what I see in the majority of the web dev ecosystem.

By ecosystem, I mean this:

- Developers are easy to find & hire for, and can work on existing code without much training because there are (relatively) standardized practices

- For any common problem, I can easily reuse (or at least learn from the source for) a package on NPM

- For any uncommon problem, I can find multiple robust discussion about it on various forums, Stack, etc. And ChatGPT probably has a workable overview.

- I can reasonably expect medium-term robust vendor support, not just from the framework developers but various hosts, third-party commercial offerings (routers, state management, UI libs, CMSes, etc.), i.e., it's going to stay a viable ecosystem for 3-5 years at least

- I don't have to reinvent the wheel for every new project / client, and can spin up a working prototype in a few minutes using boilerplates and 1-click deploys

I've been building websites since I was a kid some 30 years ago, first using Perl and cgi-bin and then PHP, and evolved my stack with it over time.

I've never been as productive as I am in the modern React ecosystem, especially with Next or Vite + MUI (https://mui.com/). Primarily this is because it allows me to build on top of other people's work and spend time only on the business logic of my app, at a very high level of abstraction (business components) and with a very high likelihood of being able find drop-in solutions for most common needs. I'm not reinventing the wheel constantly, or dealing with low-level constructs like manually updating the DOM. Or worse, dealing with server issues or updating OS packages.

What used to take days/weeks of setup now takes one click and two minutes, and I can have a useable prototype up in 2-3 hours. Because 95%+ of my codebase isn't mine anymore; I can just reuse what someone else built, and then reframe it for my own needs. And when someone else needs to continue the work, they can just pick up where I left off with minimal onboarding, because they probably already have React knowledge.

I think React, for all its faults, has just reached a point of saturation where it's like the old "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", i.e., it's a safe, proven bet for most use cases. It may or may not be the BEST bet for any project, but it's probably good enough that it would at least warrant consideration, especially if the other stacks have less community/ecosystem support.

Explore Material UI: Material UI Documentation

- UI kit (I personally have good experience with React Material UI - https://mui.com/; there is also https://tanstack.com/)

the network is settled (I got the code from some discussion group). But nothing works. Playwright has also

page.waitForLoadState({ waitUntil: "domcontentloaded" }); etc.

but they are not working for my test cases.

2)

I have noticed that https://mui.com/ have dropdown menus, which implementation is far from normal html option. Mui uses some kind

MUI | Remote UTC-6 to +5 | Multiple roles | Full time | https://mui.com/

I'm a co-founder and the CEO of MUI. Our objective in the short term is to become the UI toolkit for React, unifying the fragmented ecosystem of dependencies into a single set of simple, beautiful, consistent, and accessible React components. In the longer term, our goal is to make building great web UIs quicker, simpler, and accessible to more people through a low-code platform for developers.

Some things we’re proud of:

- 25% of the downloads that React receives.

- 1M developers on our documentation every month.

- Solid financials: profitable

If this sounds interesting to you, we are hiring for: UI Engineers, Product Engineers, Developer Advocate / Content Engineer:

Here, at Woovi, our design system has been wrote using [MUI](https://mui.com/. But, in my opinion, I have some pain points considering how MUI built their components, most focusing on the fact of how they expose their component APIs and how they handle the component structure.

My feeling as a frontend dev was that Material Design You is just run of the mill enshittification at Google. Around the time that came out, Google also started to hide more buttons in the UI, made the drop down shade much more clumsy, got rid of the excellent Pixel fingerprint scanner, etc.

It felt to me like some other busy body design team had to show innovation and so made Material You adopt your wallpaper colors (in some ugly variation). It was like the MySpaceification of Android.

Material Design spawned some of my favorite projects, like MUI: https://mui.com/

That tracks Material v2 (pre you) and IMO is the best web UI currently available. There's some tentative work on adding Material You, but I hope they don't. It's a step backward IMO, form over function and against the original spirit of Material as a usability design library. https://github.com/mui/material-ui/issues/29345

5.material-ui