Alternatives to Material logo

Alternatives to Material

Bootstrap, Material Design, Materialize, Angular Material , and Material-UI are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Material.
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+ 1
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What is Material and what are its top alternatives?

Express your creativity with Material, an animation and graphics framework for Google's Material Design and Apple's Flat UI in Swift.
Material is a tool in the Mobile Prototyping & Interaction Design Tools category of a tech stack.
Material is an open source tool with 12K GitHub stars and 1.3K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Material's open source repository on GitHub

Top Alternatives to Material

  • Bootstrap
    Bootstrap

    Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web. ...

  • Material Design
    Material Design

    Material Design is a unified system that combines theory, resources, and tools for crafting digital experiences. ...

  • Materialize
    Materialize

    A CSS Framework based on material design.

  • Angular Material
    Angular Material

    Sprint from Zero to App. Hit the ground running with comprehensive, modern UI components that work across the web, mobile and desktop. It allows to create material styled angular apps fast and easy. ...

  • Material-UI
    Material-UI

    Material UI is a library of React UI components that implements Google's Material Design. ...

  • Ant Design
    Ant Design

    An enterprise-class UI design language and React-based implementation. Graceful UI components out of the box, base on React Component. A npm + webpack + babel + dora + dva development framework. ...

  • Postman
    Postman

    It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide. ...

  • Postman
    Postman

    It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide. ...

Material alternatives & related posts

Bootstrap logo

Bootstrap

55.5K
7.7K
Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and JS for popular UI components and interactions
55.5K
7.7K
PROS OF BOOTSTRAP
  • 1.6K
    Responsiveness
  • 1.2K
    UI components
  • 943
    Consistent
  • 779
    Great docs
  • 677
    Flexible
  • 472
    HTML, CSS, and JS framework
  • 411
    Open source
  • 375
    Widely used
  • 368
    Customizable
  • 242
    HTML framework
  • 77
    Easy setup
  • 77
    Popular
  • 77
    Mobile first
  • 58
    Great grid system
  • 52
    Great community
  • 38
    Future compatibility
  • 34
    Integration
  • 28
    Very powerful foundational front-end framework
  • 24
    Standard
  • 23
    Javascript plugins
  • 19
    Build faster prototypes
  • 18
    Preprocessors
  • 14
    Grids
  • 9
    Good for a person who hates CSS
  • 8
    Clean
  • 4
    Easy to setup and learn
  • 4
    Love it
  • 4
    Rapid development
  • 3
    Great and easy to use
  • 2
    Easy to use
  • 2
    Devin schumacher rules
  • 2
    Boostrap
  • 2
    Community
  • 2
    Provide angular wrapper
  • 2
    Great and easy
  • 2
    Powerful grid system, Rapid development, Customization
  • 2
    Great customer support
  • 2
    Popularity
  • 2
    Clean and quick frontend development
  • 2
    Great and easy to make a responsive website
  • 2
    Sprzedam opla
  • 1
    Painless front end development
  • 1
    Love the classes?
  • 1
    Responsive design
  • 1
    Poop
  • 1
    So clean and simple
  • 1
    Design Agnostic
  • 1
    Numerous components
  • 1
    Material-ui
  • 1
    Recognizable
  • 1
    Intuitive
  • 1
    Vue
  • 1
    Felxible, comfortable, user-friendly
  • 1
    Pre-Defined components
  • 1
    It's fast
  • 1
    Geo
  • 1
    Not tied to jQuery
  • 1
    The fame
  • 1
    Easy setup2
CONS OF BOOTSTRAP
  • 26
    Javascript is tied to jquery
  • 16
    Every site uses the defaults
  • 15
    Grid system break points aren't ideal
  • 14
    Too much heavy decoration in default look
  • 8
    Verbose styles
  • 1
    Super heavy

related Bootstrap posts

Ganesa Vijayakumar
Full Stack Coder | Technical Architect · | 19 upvotes · 5.7M views

I'm planning to create a web application and also a mobile application to provide a very good shopping experience to the end customers. Shortly, my application will be aggregate the product details from difference sources and giving a clear picture to the user that when and where to buy that product with best in Quality and cost.

I have planned to develop this in many milestones for adding N number of features and I have picked my first part to complete the core part (aggregate the product details from different sources).

As per my work experience and knowledge, I have chosen the followings stacks to this mission.

UI: I would like to develop this application using React, React Router and React Native since I'm a little bit familiar on this and also most importantly these will help on developing both web and mobile apps. In addition, I'm gonna use the stacks JavaScript, jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile, Bootstrap wherever required.

Service: I have planned to use Java as the main business layer language as I have 7+ years of experience on this I believe I can do better work using Java than other languages. In addition, I'm thinking to use the stacks Node.js.

Database and ORM: I'm gonna pick MySQL as DB and Hibernate as ORM since I have a piece of good knowledge and also work experience on this combination.

Search Engine: I need to deal with a large amount of product data and it's in-detailed info to provide enough details to end user at the same time I need to focus on the performance area too. so I have decided to use Solr as a search engine for product search and suggestions. In addition, I'm thinking to replace Solr by Elasticsearch once explored/reviewed enough about Elasticsearch.

Host: As of now, my plan to complete the application with decent features first and deploy it in a free hosting environment like Docker and Heroku and then once it is stable then I have planned to use the AWS products Amazon S3, EC2, Amazon RDS and Amazon Route 53. I'm not sure about Microsoft Azure that what is the specialty in it than Heroku and Amazon EC2 Container Service. Anyhow, I will do explore these once again and pick the best suite one for my requirement once I reached this level.

Build and Repositories: I have decided to choose Apache Maven and Git as these are my favorites and also so popular on respectively build and repositories.

Additional Utilities :) - I would like to choose Codacy for code review as their Startup plan will be very helpful to this application. I'm already experienced with Google CheckStyle and SonarQube even I'm looking something on Codacy.

Happy Coding! Suggestions are welcome! :)

Thanks, Ganesa

See more
Francisco Quintero
Tech Lead at Dev As Pros · | 13 upvotes · 1.8M views

For Etom, a side project. We wanted to test an idea for a future and bigger project.

What Etom does is searching places. Right now, it leverages the Google Maps API. For that, we found a React component that makes this integration easy because using Google Maps API is not possible via normal API requests.

You kind of need a map to work as a proxy between the software and Google Maps API.

We hate configuration(coming from Rails world) so also decided to use Create React App because setting up a React app, with all the toys, it's a hard job.

Thanks to all the people behind Create React App it's easier to start any React application.

We also chose a module called Reactstrap which is Bootstrap UI in React components.

An important thing in this side project(and in the bigger project plan) is to measure visitor through out the app. For that we researched and found that Keen was a good choice(very good free tier limits) and also it is very simple to setup and real simple to send data to

Slack and Trello are our defaults tools to comunicate ideas and discuss topics, so, no brainer using them as well for this project.

See more
Material Design logo

Material Design

597
14
Google's Material Design
597
14
PROS OF MATERIAL DESIGN
  • 5
    They really set a new bar in design
  • 4
    An intuitive design
  • 3
    Simply, And Beautiful
  • 2
    Many great libraries
  • 0
    Composants
CONS OF MATERIAL DESIGN
  • 2
    Sometimes, it can hang the browser

related Material Design posts

Giordanna De Gregoriis
Jr Fullstack Developer at Stefanini Inspiring · | 8 upvotes · 488.9K views

TL;DR: Shall I keep developing with Nuxt.js 2 and wait for a migration guide to Nuxt 3? Or start developing with Vue.js 3 using Vite, and then migrate to Nuxt 3 when it comes out?

Long version: We have an old web application running on AngularJS and Bootstrap for frontend. It is mostly a user interface to easily read and post data to our engine.

We want to redo this web application. Started from scratch using the newest version of Angular 2+ and Material Design for frontend. We haven't even finished rewriting half of the application and it is becoming dreadful to work on.

  • The cold start takes too much time
  • Every little change reload the whole page. Seconds to minutes of development lost looking at a loading blank page just changing css
  • Code maintainability is getting worse... again... as the application grows, since we must create everytime 5 files for a new page (html, component.ts, module.ts, scss, routing.ts)

I'm currently trying to code a Proof of Concept using Nuxt.js and Tailwind CSS. But the thing is, Vue.js 3 is out and has interesting features such as the composition API, teleport and fragments. Also we wish to use the Vite frontend tooling, to improve our time developing regardless of our application size. It feels like a better alternative to Webpack, which is what Nuxt 2 uses.

I'm already trying Nuxt.js with the nuxt-vite experimental module, but many nuxt modules are still incompatible from the time I'm posting this. It is also becoming cumbersome not being able to use teleport or fragments, but that can be circumvented with good components.

What I'm asking is, what should be the wisest decision: keep developing with Nuxt 2 and wait for a migration guide to Nuxt 3? Or start developing with Vue.js 3 using Vite, and then migrate to Nuxt 3 when it comes out?

See more
Ashish Sharma
Sr. UI Associate at Daffodil Software · | 5 upvotes · 729.3K views

I am a bit confused when to choose Bootstrap vs Material Design or Tailwind CSS, and why? I mean, in which kind of projects we can work with bootstrap/Material/Tailwind CSS? If the design is made up on the grid, we prefer bootstrap, and if flat design, then material design. Similarly, when do we choose tailwind CSS?

Any suggestion would be appreciated?

See more
Materialize logo

Materialize

690
557
A modern responsive front-end framework based on Material Design
690
557
PROS OF MATERIALIZE
  • 102
    Google material design
  • 74
    Easy to use
  • 74
    Responsive
  • 54
    Modern looks
  • 48
    Open source
  • 42
    Good documentation
  • 37
    Code examples
  • 29
    Extremely light - 29kb
  • 28
    Flexible
  • 15
    Great Support
  • 10
    It looks beautiful
  • 8
    Very nice looking components to quickly build out
  • 7
    Smooth animation
  • 6
    Great Grid System
  • 4
    Great
  • 4
    Ruby gem to integrate in 2 seconds flat
  • 3
    Angular2 Support
  • 2
    MIT Lisence
  • 2
    Friendly api, easy setup, good documentation
  • 2
    Easy setup
  • 1
    React
  • 1
    Grid system
  • 1
    Because of the easy to use and very editable library
  • 1
    Responsivness
  • 1
    Jibberish
  • 1
    Friendly Api
  • 0
    Better class name
  • 0
    Rtl support
CONS OF MATERIALIZE
  • 7
    Mobile errors
  • 6
    Poor Grid System
  • 2
    Unmaintained

related Materialize posts

Angular Material  logo

Angular Material

622
32
Easy to use material design for angular
622
32
PROS OF ANGULAR MATERIAL
  • 12
    Components
  • 8
    Backed by a well known company
  • 4
    Simple
  • 3
    Easy
  • 2
    Very good documentation
  • 2
    Rte
  • 1
    Implements well known material design
CONS OF ANGULAR MATERIAL
  • 4
    Fairly large
  • 2
    Look like 90s stuffs
  • 2
    Suck
  • 2
    Shit

related Angular Material posts

I am a novice to AngularJS, but I have a strong web development background. I need help with the pros and cons of choosing the Angular Material or PrimeNg for our new application. Our new application will be using Angular for the front-end and .NET Core for the Web API. I looked at both tools and leaned toward Angular Material. It would be beneficial if I could obtain some expert advice from the community.

See more
Material-UI logo

Material-UI

2.3K
445
Material UI is a library of React UI components that implements Google's Material Design.
2.3K
445
PROS OF MATERIAL-UI
  • 141
    React
  • 82
    Material Design
  • 60
    Ui components
  • 30
    CSS framework
  • 26
    Component
  • 15
    Looks great
  • 13
    Responsive
  • 12
    Good documentation
  • 9
    LESS
  • 8
    Ui component
  • 7
    Open source
  • 6
    Flexible
  • 6
    Code examples
  • 5
    JSS
  • 3
    Supports old browsers out of the box
  • 3
    Interface
  • 3
    Angular
  • 3
    Very accessible
  • 3
    Fun
  • 2
    Typescript support
  • 2
    # of components
  • 2
    Designed for Server Side Rendering
  • 1
    Support for multiple styling systems
  • 1
    Accessibility
  • 1
    Easy to work with
  • 1
    Css
CONS OF MATERIAL-UI
  • 36
    Hard to learn. Bad documentation
  • 29
    Hard to customize
  • 22
    Hard to understand Docs
  • 9
    Bad performance
  • 7
    Extra library needed for date/time pickers
  • 7
    For editable table component need to use material-table
  • 2
    Typescript Support
  • 1
    # of components

related Material-UI posts

Adebayo Akinlaja
Engineering Manager at Andela · | 30 upvotes · 3.5M views

I picked up an idea to develop and it was no brainer I had to go with React for the frontend. I was faced with challenges when it came to what component framework to use. I had worked extensively with Material-UI but I needed something different that would offer me wider range of well customized components (I became pretty slow at styling). I brought in Evergreen after several sampling and reads online but again, after several prototype development against Evergreen—since I was using TypeScript and I had to import custom Type, it felt exhaustive. After I validated Evergreen with the designs of the idea I was developing, I also noticed I might have to do a lot of styling. I later stumbled on Material Kit, the one specifically made for React . It was promising with beautifully crafted components, most of which fits into the designs pages I had on ground.

A major problem of Material Kit for me is it isn't written in TypeScript and there isn't any plans to support its TypeScript version. I rolled up my sleeve and started converting their components to TypeScript and if you'll ask me, I am still on it.

In summary, I used the Create React App with TypeScript support and I am spending some time converting Material Kit to TypeScript before I start developing against it. All of these components are going to be hosted on Bit.

If you feel I am crazy or I have gotten something wrong, I'll be willing to listen to your opinion. Also, if you want to have a share of whatever TypeScript version of Material Kit I end up coming up with, let me know.

See more

I just finished tweaking styles details of my hobby project MovieGeeks (https://moviegeeks.co/): The minimalist Online Movie Catalog

This time I want to share my thoughts on the Tech-Stack I decided to use on the Frontend: React, React Router, Material-UI and React-Apollo:

  1. React is by far the Front-End "framework" with the biggest community. Some of the newest features like Suspense and Hooks makes it even more awesome and gives you even more power to write clean UI's

  2. Material UI is a very solid and stable set of react components that not only look good, but also are easy to use and customize. This was my first time using this library and I am very happy with the result

  3. React-Apollo in my opinion is the best GraphQL client for a React application. Easy to use and understand and it gives you awesome features out of the box like cache. With libraries like react-apollo-hooks you can even use it with the hooks api which makes the code cleaner and easier to follow.

Any feedback is much appreciated :)

See more
Ant Design logo

Ant Design

1.1K
224
A set of high-quality React components
1.1K
224
PROS OF ANT DESIGN
  • 48
    Lots of components
  • 33
    Polished and enterprisey look and feel
  • 21
    TypeScript
  • 21
    Easy to integrate
  • 18
    Es6 support
  • 17
    Typescript support
  • 17
    Beautiful and solid
  • 16
    Beautifully Animated Components
  • 15
    Quick Release rhythm
  • 14
    Great documentation
  • 2
    Easy to customize Forms
  • 2
    Opensource and free of cost
CONS OF ANT DESIGN
  • 24
    Less
  • 10
    Large File Size
  • 4
    Poor accessibility support
  • 3
    Dangerous to use as a base in component libraries

related Ant Design posts

Sarmad Chaudhary
Founder & CEO at Ebiz Ltd. · | 9 upvotes · 1.3M views

Hi there!

I just want to have a simple poll/vote...

If you guys need a UI/Component Library for React, Vue.js, or AngularJS, which type of library would you prefer between:

1 ) A single maintained cross-framework library that is 100% compatible and can be integrated with any popular framework like Vue, React, Angular 2, Svelte, etc.

2) A native framework-specific library developed to work only on target framework like ElementUI for Vue, Ant Design for React.

Your advice would help a lot! Thanks in advance :)

See more

Hello, A question to frontend developers. I am a beginner on frontend.

I am building a UI for my company to replace old legacy one with React and this question is about choosing how to apply design to it.

I have Tailwind CSS on one hand and Ant Design on the other (I didnt like mui and Bootstrap doesn't seem to have enterprise components as ant) As far as I understand, tailwind is great. It allows me to literally build an application without touching the css but I have to build my own react components with it. Ant design or mantine has ready to use components which I can use and rapidly build my application.

My question is, is it the right approach to: - Use a component framework for now and replace legacy app. - Introduce tailwind later when I have a frontend resource in hand and then build own component library

Thank you.

See more
Postman logo

Postman

95.5K
1.8K
Only complete API development environment
95.5K
1.8K
PROS OF POSTMAN
  • 490
    Easy to use
  • 369
    Great tool
  • 276
    Makes developing rest api's easy peasy
  • 156
    Easy setup, looks good
  • 144
    The best api workflow out there
  • 53
    It's the best
  • 53
    History feature
  • 44
    Adds real value to my workflow
  • 43
    Great interface that magically predicts your needs
  • 35
    The best in class app
  • 12
    Can save and share script
  • 10
    Fully featured without looking cluttered
  • 8
    Collections
  • 8
    Option to run scrips
  • 8
    Global/Environment Variables
  • 7
    Shareable Collections
  • 7
    Dead simple and useful. Excellent
  • 7
    Dark theme easy on the eyes
  • 6
    Awesome customer support
  • 6
    Great integration with newman
  • 5
    Documentation
  • 5
    Simple
  • 5
    The test script is useful
  • 4
    Saves responses
  • 4
    This has simplified my testing significantly
  • 4
    Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,3
  • 4
    Easy as pie
  • 3
    API-network
  • 3
    I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis
  • 3
    Mocking API calls with predefined response
  • 2
    Now supports GraphQL
  • 2
    Postman Runner CI Integration
  • 2
    Easy to setup, test and provides test storage
  • 2
    Continuous integration using newman
  • 2
    Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable
  • 2
    Runner
  • 2
    Graph
  • 1
    <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>
CONS OF POSTMAN
  • 10
    Stores credentials in HTTP
  • 9
    Bloated features and UI
  • 8
    Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens
  • 7
    Poor GraphQL support
  • 5
    Expensive
  • 3
    Not free after 5 users
  • 3
    Can't prompt for per-request variables
  • 1
    Import swagger
  • 1
    Support websocket
  • 1
    Import curl

related Postman posts

Noah Zoschke
Engineering Manager at Segment · | 30 upvotes · 3.1M views

We just launched the Segment Config API (try it out for yourself here) — a set of public REST APIs that enable you to manage your Segment configuration. A public API is only as good as its #documentation. For the API reference doc we are using Postman.

Postman is an “API development environment”. You download the desktop app, and build API requests by URL and payload. Over time you can build up a set of requests and organize them into a “Postman Collection”. You can generalize a collection with “collection variables”. This allows you to parameterize things like username, password and workspace_name so a user can fill their own values in before making an API call. This makes it possible to use Postman for one-off API tasks instead of writing code.

Then you can add Markdown content to the entire collection, a folder of related methods, and/or every API method to explain how the APIs work. You can publish a collection and easily share it with a URL.

This turns Postman from a personal #API utility to full-blown public interactive API documentation. The result is a great looking web page with all the API calls, docs and sample requests and responses in one place. Check out the results here.

Postman’s powers don’t end here. You can automate Postman with “test scripts” and have it periodically run a collection scripts as “monitors”. We now have #QA around all the APIs in public docs to make sure they are always correct

Along the way we tried other techniques for documenting APIs like ReadMe.io or Swagger UI. These required a lot of effort to customize.

Writing and maintaining a Postman collection takes some work, but the resulting documentation site, interactivity and API testing tools are well worth it.

See more
Simon Reymann
Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 27 upvotes · 5.6M views

Our whole Node.js backend stack consists of the following tools:

  • Lerna as a tool for multi package and multi repository management
  • npm as package manager
  • NestJS as Node.js framework
  • TypeScript as programming language
  • ExpressJS as web server
  • Swagger UI for visualizing and interacting with the API’s resources
  • Postman as a tool for API development
  • TypeORM as object relational mapping layer
  • JSON Web Token for access token management

The main reason we have chosen Node.js over PHP is related to the following artifacts:

  • Made for the web and widely in use: Node.js is a software platform for developing server-side network services. Well-known projects that rely on Node.js include the blogging software Ghost, the project management tool Trello and the operating system WebOS. Node.js requires the JavaScript runtime environment V8, which was specially developed by Google for the popular Chrome browser. This guarantees a very resource-saving architecture, which qualifies Node.js especially for the operation of a web server. Ryan Dahl, the developer of Node.js, released the first stable version on May 27, 2009. He developed Node.js out of dissatisfaction with the possibilities that JavaScript offered at the time. The basic functionality of Node.js has been mapped with JavaScript since the first version, which can be expanded with a large number of different modules. The current package managers (npm or Yarn) for Node.js know more than 1,000,000 of these modules.
  • Fast server-side solutions: Node.js adopts the JavaScript "event-loop" to create non-blocking I/O applications that conveniently serve simultaneous events. With the standard available asynchronous processing within JavaScript/TypeScript, highly scalable, server-side solutions can be realized. The efficient use of the CPU and the RAM is maximized and more simultaneous requests can be processed than with conventional multi-thread servers.
  • A language along the entire stack: Widely used frameworks such as React or AngularJS or Vue.js, which we prefer, are written in JavaScript/TypeScript. If Node.js is now used on the server side, you can use all the advantages of a uniform script language throughout the entire application development. The same language in the back- and frontend simplifies the maintenance of the application and also the coordination within the development team.
  • Flexibility: Node.js sets very few strict dependencies, rules and guidelines and thus grants a high degree of flexibility in application development. There are no strict conventions so that the appropriate architecture, design structures, modules and features can be freely selected for the development.
See more
Postman logo

Postman

95.5K
1.8K
Only complete API development environment
95.5K
1.8K
PROS OF POSTMAN
  • 490
    Easy to use
  • 369
    Great tool
  • 276
    Makes developing rest api's easy peasy
  • 156
    Easy setup, looks good
  • 144
    The best api workflow out there
  • 53
    It's the best
  • 53
    History feature
  • 44
    Adds real value to my workflow
  • 43
    Great interface that magically predicts your needs
  • 35
    The best in class app
  • 12
    Can save and share script
  • 10
    Fully featured without looking cluttered
  • 8
    Collections
  • 8
    Option to run scrips
  • 8
    Global/Environment Variables
  • 7
    Shareable Collections
  • 7
    Dead simple and useful. Excellent
  • 7
    Dark theme easy on the eyes
  • 6
    Awesome customer support
  • 6
    Great integration with newman
  • 5
    Documentation
  • 5
    Simple
  • 5
    The test script is useful
  • 4
    Saves responses
  • 4
    This has simplified my testing significantly
  • 4
    Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,3
  • 4
    Easy as pie
  • 3
    API-network
  • 3
    I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis
  • 3
    Mocking API calls with predefined response
  • 2
    Now supports GraphQL
  • 2
    Postman Runner CI Integration
  • 2
    Easy to setup, test and provides test storage
  • 2
    Continuous integration using newman
  • 2
    Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable
  • 2
    Runner
  • 2
    Graph
  • 1
    <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>
CONS OF POSTMAN
  • 10
    Stores credentials in HTTP
  • 9
    Bloated features and UI
  • 8
    Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens
  • 7
    Poor GraphQL support
  • 5
    Expensive
  • 3
    Not free after 5 users
  • 3
    Can't prompt for per-request variables
  • 1
    Import swagger
  • 1
    Support websocket
  • 1
    Import curl

related Postman posts

Noah Zoschke
Engineering Manager at Segment · | 30 upvotes · 3.1M views

We just launched the Segment Config API (try it out for yourself here) — a set of public REST APIs that enable you to manage your Segment configuration. A public API is only as good as its #documentation. For the API reference doc we are using Postman.

Postman is an “API development environment”. You download the desktop app, and build API requests by URL and payload. Over time you can build up a set of requests and organize them into a “Postman Collection”. You can generalize a collection with “collection variables”. This allows you to parameterize things like username, password and workspace_name so a user can fill their own values in before making an API call. This makes it possible to use Postman for one-off API tasks instead of writing code.

Then you can add Markdown content to the entire collection, a folder of related methods, and/or every API method to explain how the APIs work. You can publish a collection and easily share it with a URL.

This turns Postman from a personal #API utility to full-blown public interactive API documentation. The result is a great looking web page with all the API calls, docs and sample requests and responses in one place. Check out the results here.

Postman’s powers don’t end here. You can automate Postman with “test scripts” and have it periodically run a collection scripts as “monitors”. We now have #QA around all the APIs in public docs to make sure they are always correct

Along the way we tried other techniques for documenting APIs like ReadMe.io or Swagger UI. These required a lot of effort to customize.

Writing and maintaining a Postman collection takes some work, but the resulting documentation site, interactivity and API testing tools are well worth it.

See more
Simon Reymann
Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 27 upvotes · 5.6M views

Our whole Node.js backend stack consists of the following tools:

  • Lerna as a tool for multi package and multi repository management
  • npm as package manager
  • NestJS as Node.js framework
  • TypeScript as programming language
  • ExpressJS as web server
  • Swagger UI for visualizing and interacting with the API’s resources
  • Postman as a tool for API development
  • TypeORM as object relational mapping layer
  • JSON Web Token for access token management

The main reason we have chosen Node.js over PHP is related to the following artifacts:

  • Made for the web and widely in use: Node.js is a software platform for developing server-side network services. Well-known projects that rely on Node.js include the blogging software Ghost, the project management tool Trello and the operating system WebOS. Node.js requires the JavaScript runtime environment V8, which was specially developed by Google for the popular Chrome browser. This guarantees a very resource-saving architecture, which qualifies Node.js especially for the operation of a web server. Ryan Dahl, the developer of Node.js, released the first stable version on May 27, 2009. He developed Node.js out of dissatisfaction with the possibilities that JavaScript offered at the time. The basic functionality of Node.js has been mapped with JavaScript since the first version, which can be expanded with a large number of different modules. The current package managers (npm or Yarn) for Node.js know more than 1,000,000 of these modules.
  • Fast server-side solutions: Node.js adopts the JavaScript "event-loop" to create non-blocking I/O applications that conveniently serve simultaneous events. With the standard available asynchronous processing within JavaScript/TypeScript, highly scalable, server-side solutions can be realized. The efficient use of the CPU and the RAM is maximized and more simultaneous requests can be processed than with conventional multi-thread servers.
  • A language along the entire stack: Widely used frameworks such as React or AngularJS or Vue.js, which we prefer, are written in JavaScript/TypeScript. If Node.js is now used on the server side, you can use all the advantages of a uniform script language throughout the entire application development. The same language in the back- and frontend simplifies the maintenance of the application and also the coordination within the development team.
  • Flexibility: Node.js sets very few strict dependencies, rules and guidelines and thus grants a high degree of flexibility in application development. There are no strict conventions so that the appropriate architecture, design structures, modules and features can be freely selected for the development.
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