What is Material UI?

March 15, 2022 By Mark Otto Off

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:

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,

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.

What is Material UI: building MUI apps with Flatlogic Platform

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.