Toolpad maintenance mode

[fosple]

Hey @apedroferreira,

I just saw the roadmap item Toolpad maintenance mode #5110. Does this mean also Toolpad Core is not developed further anymore or is it just for Toolpad Studio? 😢

[prakhargupta1]

Hey @fosple,

Thanks for sharing your concern. This item is part of the bigger topic where we are reevaluating our priorities. Building dashboards faster is still a problem that we see and want to solve for, it's a user need that reflects well in the Toolpad Core adoption. But for now, we want to be transparent that no active development will be done for the next few months. However, this is not a permanent stop. Once we have more clarity, development may resume.

Meanwhile, would you like to share how Toolpad Core has helped you with your use case?

[fosple]

Hey @prakhargupta1.

Thanks for the fast reply. Too sad to hear Toolpad Core is on hold for the moment, but glad you're still consider solving the user need in the future.

Our use case:
We build a new SaaS application. When building this new tool we usually have to write a lot of boilerplate code which is basically the same for all new projects (login, logout, register, navigation, notifications, user management, ...). Components from MUI already speed us up so we do not have to build this small building blocks (like Buttons, Checkboxes,...). But we were looking for more complete components which fit well together and allow us to focus on the problem we solve for our users rather than setting up all the basics. This is what Toolpad Core was for us: big building blocks of standard production ready UI components which fit well together and can be combined in a modular way.

If you want more info, feel free to reach out.

[vpmartin]

Hey there!

Sad to hear that the project will be put on hold. Our main reason to go for Toolpad Core (versus other dashboarding frameworks) back in November of last year, despite the very early stage, was that it was created and maintained by the MUI team, which represented a long-term quality and support guarantee for us. Going further though, I'm glad you are reevaluating priorities as it often ends up answering the user's most wanted requests.

As for our use case, we're working on some kind of special environment and had plenty of disparate tools: some scripts running directly in the terminal, some with periodic jobs that generated static output files, some with heavy clients such as Tk/Tkinter... it caused lots of context switching on the job. We wanted to try to make our workflow more uniform, in both UI and developer experience, and limit terminal interactions, by providing a unified dashboard-like UI that regrouped most of our current tools in a single codebase.

With little web development knowledge in the team (which was mostly Python/shell/scripting at that time), Toolpad Core + MUI allowed us to bootstrap our project, and dive directly in business logic. We started prototyping right away to learn on the job, without getting bothered by the overhead: how to create a React app, what's Next.js, how to setup navigation, etc. It overall did a great job at helping us improve our knowledge, and we successfully unified our workflows in less than 6 months.

[nimo23]

Once we have more clarity, development may resume.

Maybe I can give some direction:

It would be very cool to see Toolpad as an alternative to something like https://github.com/refinedev/refine or https://marmelab.com/react-admin/.

Toolpad can integrate

• Tanstack Router
• Tanstack Query
• Tanstack DB
• Tanstack Form
• Tanstack Table
• etc.

to simplify the overall building for dashboards, admin panels or simple IDE's with native support for:

• Auth
• I18N
• CRUD
• etc.

A good overview of everything that can be integrated into Toolpad can be found here:

https://marmelab.com/blog/2023/07/04/react-admin-vs-refine.html