react-admin VS antd

> "Are there examples of companies adopting this model?"

Many examples across the industry:

- Autodesk AutoCAD (closed) + Plugins/Addons (many open)

- MS Windows (closed) + Many 3rd party programs (open)

- Github (closed) + Github Actions (open)

- Npm (closed) + Npm modules (mostly open)

> "What are the potential benefits or pitfalls?"

Benefits:

- Harder to replicate, the company gets to keep the "secret sauce" a secret

- Opening up a way to "extend" the platform means 3rd party developers add value to your system

- The core isn't open, so less effort is required to maintain compare to OpenSource

Pitfalls:

- Closed-source is hard to verify, company is essentially saying "trust me bro"

- Less innovation, as user's can't contribute to the core

> "How does it impact community engagement and software adoption?"

There's hardcore FOSS advocates that will hate anything not fully open. But a business has to make money and protect it's IP, having a "closed core" is one way to do that and ensure a sustainable business model.

Another approach is the opposite, open-core + closed-premium-addons. An example of this is "React Admin"

- Open Core -> https://github.com/marmelab/react-admin

- Premium Modules Offering -> https://react-admin-ee.marmelab.com/

Official Website: https://marmelab.com/react-admin/

React-Admin is a React-based frontend framework for building admin applications that talk to a backend data API. It offers a pluggable mechanism for easily adapting to the specific API style of your backend.

With these features, data fetching and forms become significantly easier to implement in React. However, creating a great user experience involves integrating all these hooks, which can be complex. Alternatively, you can use a framework like react-admin where user-friendly forms with optimistic updates are built-in.

31.react-admin

For the admin panel, or basically anything with basic crud operations, take a look at https://marmelab.com/react-admin/. Most frontend devs don't like it, since it limits you somewhat in customization, but at the same time, it is very easy to grasp for someone coming from a backend dev profile, who just wants a crud UI. It even has a guesser template that proposes an initial screen layout based on the response of your api, which you can then copy-paste and finetune. It is really made to make quick admin crud ui's.

We’ve developed a business based on an open-source platform called react-admin. Embracing the open-source spirit, we’re sharing the key performance indicators of this business. We hope it will help other open-source developers build their own business.

React-Admin: As the name suggests, this component library is targeted at building administrator interfaces for B2B (business-to-business), for example, managing users in your system. It is based on Material design and has a neat feature where you can let it “guess” your list views by providing a sample API endpoint for your data.

- We want a solution that creates CRUD (create, read, update, delete) quickly and requires minimal effort. - We want to be able to create some sort of complex interface if the task requires it. - We make cool, beautiful projects, so we want a visually pleasing solution. - We want the solution to be independent of the language on the back-end, because, for example, we started with PHP, Laravel, but over time node.js, Go appeared in the stack. In short, we want fast, beautiful and custom. We've had time to poke at various off-the-shelf solutions that we've been advised. They're good, but: - they are created specifically for some frameworks / languages like laravel, node.js - they can only generate CRUDs with a rigidly defined structure, where you can't implement or customize anything of your own. - they can't be styled Here's what we've been looking at Control Panels for Laravel: https://demo.backpackforlaravel.com/admin/dashboard Not a very pretty solution in our opinion. And the promo page has nice screenshots, not the demo "well such". https://orchid.software/en/ Not particularly functional, but neatly done https://nova.laravel.com They have a beautiful, but rigidly set strutkrua, you can not create castmon interfaces, stylize them. Just do CRUD and that's it. And it's paid https://filamentphp.com/ Analog to Nova, with essentially the same problems. For node.js: https://adminjs.co Nice promo, and the demo is way behind As standalone dashboards: https://strapi.io/ Very cool, but for other purposes. It's more of an entity builder with an interface and API https://pocketbase.io/ Similarly, it's an entity builder with an interface and API https://directus.io/ This is a backend builder. https://filamentphp.com/It is purely for php, you can't customize styles, you can't create your own interfaces. It is possible to create only tables and forms by template, and we remember that we want flexibility, independence from the language and the ability to create their own interfaces and customize them https://flatlogic.com This is also more of a backend builder. Direct competitors: https://github.com/refinedev/refine https://marmelab.com/react-admin/is probably the best solution that is currently on the market, they have been developing for a long time, they are our favorite. To the disadvantages we considered the following points: quite an old project, and somewhere the technology is already outdated, unsympathetic interface, old UI libraries. Huge documentation, it’s simply to create CRUD but hard to work without immersion. After all this there is only one conclusion: you need to do it yourself....

Ant Design

Official Website: https://ant.design/

Ant Design (antd) is a React component library for building beautiful and modern user interfaces. It comes with a collection of prebuilt, enterprise-level UI components. To install Ant Design, use the command below:

🔍 Site ⭐ GitHub

(I'm a frontend dev, but I came into the design side only later in my career, after having started as a full-stack programmer.)

I think this book is probably the single best resource I've seen on the topic: https://www.refactoringui.com/

It's a really easy-to-use format (one quick tip on each page, with clear examples).

It's from the people who made Tailwind, a CSS framework that's basically a reimagining of Bootcamp for the Javascript/component era.

Check out some of their templates: https://tailwindui.com/templates

These are lookalike "modern" designs that you can pay to use, or just draw inspiration from. Imitation == flattery and all that.

Along similar lines, check out the free Next.js templates: https://vercel.com/templates/next.js

If you want to build up from components instead, Tailwind offers a component library too: https://tailwindui.com/components

For React, I prefer the astoundingly good MUI framework (amazing components with lots of customizability, a good enough default look, and great documentation): https://mui.com/ If you end up going this route, using their Figma kit (https://mui.com/store/items/figma-react/) plus the Refactoring UI book from above should allow you to whip up a pretty standard-looking, "pretty enough" design in very little time. And then implementing it using the actual MUI lib would just take a few days.

There's also Ant Design: https://ant.design/

And Chakra UI: https://chakra-ui.com/

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For more theoretical stuff (i.e., less visual but still very valuable), the UX research group Nielsen Norman still has a treasure trove of valuable advice: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/top-ten-guidelines-for-home...

You should know the basics of accessibility (beyond general usability, this alos means alt text, header levels, contrast ratios, readability, screen readers, keyboard navigation, special considerations for the hard of sight and hearing, etc.): https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/ or at least use an easy checklist tool like Microsoft's WCAG analyzer: https://accessibilityinsights.io/

Ant Design is a fantastic toolkit for React developers. It's like having a box of building blocks that are not only stylish but also super functional. With Ant Design, you get a collection of pre-made React components that you can easily put together to create a sleek and modern look for your web projects. Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned developer, Ant Design simplifies the process of making your web applications both visually appealing and user-friendly. It's a go-to choice for those who want a seamless blend of design and functionality in their React applications.

The backend UI is a combination of React + MUI + Ant Design.

Material-UI Ant Design Chakra UI Semantic UI React

ant-design -> Less configurable. Limited but nice components.

GitHub stars: 88k GitHub link: https://github.com/ant-design/ant-design Documentation: https://ant.design/docs/react/getting-started