What is MightyMeld? The Future of React Development
MightyMeld changes how React developers approach building front-end UIs.
MightyMeld styles itself as "Figma for developers," emphasizing how it bridges the gap between UI design and code development processes. How?
With MightyMeld you are getting a development tool that allows you to visually update and create elements in your UI with an intuitive GUI-like studio. Unlike most low-code tools that work in a contained universe and produce unnatural code, MightyMeld maintains a practical balance, ensuring you are not uncomfortably disconnected from your dev environment.
Features You Get With MightyMeld
Prefabs: MightyMeld offers a collection of Prefabs elements and components to use as building blocks for your React application. You can drag-and-drop prefabs to quickly scaffold your interface. Each prefab also supports custom styles to fit your design specifications. A component tree representation in the MightyMeld studio allows you to keep track of the prefab modules.
AI code generator: 2024 has been the year of AI tools. We've seen countless releases, some useful, some practical, some gimmicky to satisfy FOMO and hop on the trend. MightyMeld utilizes the power of AI as a natural code facilitator. @Schkolne- the MightyMeld founder describes it as a means “to assist, optimize code, and implement features in your app's context, rather than generate some code”.
Library support: Flexibility to third-party component libraries with MightyMeld is important. With MightyMeld configured in your React app, you have support for libraries like Tailwind CSS, Chakra UI, and Material UI. You can install prefab plugins for these libraries and use them inside your React app.
Realtime changes: One of my favorite things about MightyMeld is how code changes reflect in real time inside your chosen IDE. Your visual edits and generated AI code happen in the studio dashboard and simultaneously update in your code editor. As a bonus, it also adjusts to your preferred syntax style, giving you code that looks just like you wrote it yourself.
Why MightyMeld is Perfect for React Developers
Let's be honest, a low-code visual tool isn’t new. Many have attempted to tackle the problems of building client-side UIs. As frontends become more complex, it becomes more important to handle basic UI development faster and simpler. The default approach so far is to assist developers with a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) system. Ultimately, however, most fail to create a powerful enough tool to support full development from the ground up.
This is where MightyMeld has the upper hand by being the one visual tool capable of handling such responsibility.
You can visit the official MightyMeld blog to better understand the underlying architecture of MightyMeld.
In this section, I will discuss what it’s like to build React interfaces with MightyMeld and what my general thoughts are on its practicality.
So let's get into it!
Below is your MightyMeld studio dashboard. From here you can design, and take control of your application style. When an element is selected you can write in style attributes on the right of your studio.
MightyMeld is built to speed up your dev process and the AI prompt feature does just that. To use this feature, select an element, and describe the changes you’d like to make inside the AI prompt box.
Like many AI tools the more information you provide the better your results will be. Particularly when making complex style changes.
Here, I am using Tailwind styles as a preference. As mentioned, MightyMeld provides Tailwind prefabs with the plugin. Once installed, you can drag and drop them into the app’s Component tree. With prefabs, you can create new reusable components.
You should know that these prefabs aren’t always styled perfectly. Some may not come as you expect, regardless, they are a great way to cut down on writing repetitive code.
To learn how to build styled components in MightyMeld watch this tutorial video.
The beautiful side of MightyMeld lies in how it does not forfeit the development experience within the Studio. You barely need to switch to your IDE. In the event that you intentionally switch back and make UI changes. You could force-load those changes into the studio source editor if they don’t automatically show up. Performing Git operations like commit, push, pull, and inspect Git diff from your studio is also a nice-to-have feature.
The final feature I’ll discuss is handling conditional statements and ternary operators on elements. With a click of a button, you could conditionally show/hide elements in your UI.
For example, in my app, I have a showTab state set to the boolean value true:
import React, { useState } from 'react';
const App = () => {
// State to control the visibility of the tab
const [showTab, setShowTab] = useState(true);
return (
<div>
{/* Button to toggle the tab visibility */}
<button onClick={() => setShowTab(!showTab)}>
{showTab ? 'Hide Tab' : 'Show Tab'}
</button>
{/* Conditionally render this tab based on showTab */}
<div className="tab">
<h2>This is a tab</h2>
</div>
</div>
);
};
export default App;
Within MightyMeld I could wrap any div in a conditional && statement and trigger a state change when I click my button. This will show or hide the wrapper div.
That concludes my impression using MightyMeld.
Getting Started with MightyMeld
Now you know what MightyMeld is about, here’s a quick guide on getting started using it.
Install the MightyMeld package when you Run the following command:
npm install -g mightymeld # Install globally
or
npm i -D mightymeld # Install locally
Next, configure your React project by running:
npx mightymeld
This command will create a mightymeld.json file and walk you through the steps to setting up your application to use MightyMeld.
It will also launch the MightyMeld studio running your React application.
Be sure to read the MightyMeld docs on their Babel or SWC plugin to confirm if you will need to install either of the plugins independently. More often than not your project framework should already include the information pulled with these plugins.
Join the MightyMeld Revolution!
MightyMeld bridges design and traditional coding while maintaining code integrity seamlessly with your existing development workflows. As web development evolves, Mightymeld will change how we approach code in conjunction with user interface design. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting, consider trying MightyMeld and experience the visual, intuitive, and powerful future of React development.