As we approach the next Sprint of our Capstone project, I want to share a technology I recently began using and instantly fell in love with. During my journey of learning Web-Development, I have never used front-end frameworks. I knew they exists, and I had a great idea of how convenient it is to use them.
Bootstrap
I tried Bootstrap for the first time ever when I worked on my Invoice Management System, written using the .NET core web framework (Blazor). If you are unfamiliar with Bootstrap, it is a free and open-source CSS framework that contains HTML, CSS, and JavaScript-based templates for user interface components. Later, I and my team used Bootstrap for the Venue Management System project, which turned out to be one of my favorite projects I have ever worked on. I got really comfortable using it and obviously wanted to continue exploring it more in-depth during Capstone.
Despite feeling comfortable with Bootstrap, I continued looking for something else. I must have watched hundreds of videos about other frameworks, but felt like they were not a good fit for the Capstone project. At one point, I was ready to give up, but for some reason, the YouTube algorithm was not letting it go so easily. One day, it suggested me an overview of MUI. After 30 seconds, I knew that I finally found what I was looking for!
Let me introduce you to MUI
MUI is a massive library of UI components for React applications. It is an open-source project that adheres to Google’s standards and guidelines for UI components. One of my favorite parts about MUI (besides absolutely gorgeous UI components) is Theming feature, which allows developers and designers to customize components easily!
I think it is important to note that besides beautiful UI components, MUI provides amazing documentation, which helps designers and developers to ensure the user interface stays consistent across the whole web application. More important, many argue that basic components look the same as Bootstrap components. I will admit that it is true, and they do look similar. However, MUI provides a way larger selection of ready-to-use components than Bootstrap lacks. In addition, MUI has over 2,000 open-source contributors and 2.3 million npm downloads per week, which shows you how massive MUI’s community is.
Conclusion
The idea of this post was to show my most and least favorite technologies, but I don’t believe that it gives this atmosphere. I love working with Bootstrap, and it will always going to be a library to use when there is a requirement for simple and easy-to-use UI. However, I want my Capstone project to be flashy, modern, and have top of notch UI components. So, until the next time, Bootstrap! And it is nice to meet you, MUI! I am excited to work with you!
