Introduction to Materia: An API Builder made for Frontend developers
Materia is an API builder that help you build powerful web and mobile application with database. On one side, there is Materia Designer which is a desktop application that provides all the tools to develop and manage your application. On the other side, there is Materia Server, an open source server that host your application which you can install for free anywhere. In few words, Materia Designer will help you to create the application that Materia Server will host.
Materia is a mix between Wordpress and Airtable
You can structure and manage your data easily like Airtable — Instead of being focused on content like Wordpress and other CMS, Materia let you focus on your data,
Your Materia applications can be hosted anywhere like Wordpress for free.
Simple application structure
The structure of a Materia application is straight forward:
- Define some entities that represent the data you need to work with in your application (e.g. users, tasks, etc…),
- Define the relations that exists between the entities (e.g. a user has one or many tasks and a task has one or many users),
- Define some queries to fetch the data you need in your application (e.g. fetch all tasks for a specific user ordered by creation date). You can use the query builder to generate visually your queries or you can create them using Javascript or SQL,
- Create some API endpoints that use the queries you defined in your entities (e.g. GET /api/users/tasks will return the result of the query that fetch all tasks for a specific user). If your endpoints are more complex than just calling a query, you can also code it in Javascript,
- Assign permissions to protect your API endpoints to some specific conditions (e.g. Only registered users can access GET /api/users/tasks).
You can extend and automate the capabilities of your application with addons by bringing awesome features in one click like Emailing, User management, Social logins, Payments, Server Side Rendering (SSR) etc. Each addon adds endpoints and queries to your application to ease the integration of a specific feature in your frontend.
Materia’s goal is to automate most of the redundant tasks to let you focus on the core features of your application. Don’t reinvent the wheel by recreating again another login feature, we got you covered!
Frontend Integration
Materia is client agnostic which means it can work with any client framework to design your frontend (which can be for any kind of device — browser, mobile native, desktop, IOT… as long as it can consume a REST API). Materia delivers an API that you can use to work with real data in all your frontend creations. Materia can help you to boilerplate your client with most famous web framework (React, Angular, Vue.js).
To start using Materia Designer, go on https://getmateria.com and download it for your OS (available on Windows and Mac OS X).
To learn more about Materia, take a look at the 5 min Quickstart or at the Todo application tutorial.
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