Material Theme

Material Theme

Ext JS 6.2+ contains a new material theme for the Modern and Classic toolkits. This theme is based on Google’s Material Design, which has gained much popularity as a design foundation for many developers. It has a minimalistic look and bold colors, but also allows for enough customization for a personalized application theme.

While this theme does embrace the concepts of Material design, you may find you have questions to maintain the spec. Check out Google’s Google Material Design website for reference.

Let’s walk through some of the features of Material Design and how it relates to the Ext JS material theme.

Bold Color Choices

One of the most exciting parts of the Material Design is the large selection of bold colors. You can find a full swatch of color choices on the Material Design color palette page. These colors were hand-picked by designers to be aesthetically pleasing while maintaining the spirit of Material Design.

Each color is referenced by its common name (red, green, blue, etc). The colors also have multiple weights that can be used as accents for the base color.

To make things easier, the Ext JS Material Design Theme provides a material-color function that allows quick access to any color at any weight without having to look it up or use hex numbers.

Note: Our theme utilizes 300, 500, and 700 as our light, base, and dark color weights.

Customizing the color of your Ext JS application is very simple. Just set a $base-color-name and an $accent-color-name, and we will do the rest. Color combinations are then created based on the guideline, and components will respect these colors in your application.

The theme also exposes variables for every color available. After setting your base and accent colors, you can easily fine tune any aspect of your application’s appearance.

Spacing and Padding

Material Design uses white space and padding to convey a separation of concerns. Occasionally, you will see thin rule lines, but generally organization is accomplished by spacing your text or imagery.

The guide uses an 8dp/px baseline grid to which all components align. Generally, you will see padding of 16dp/px throughout the theme.

Shadows and Depth

The philosophy of Material Design is to treat layers like paper. It conveys depth by casting shadows from one layer to another. When the elevation is small, the shadow will be minor. But when stacked higher, these shadows grow.

Ext JS provides the material-shadow mixin to help create shadows at different elevations. However, this should be used with caution. Adding unnecessary shadows is confusing to users and is only recommended when there is an obvious reason for a stacked effect.

Typography

Material Design uses “Roboto” as its core font. The guide also specifies a small set of sizes, line heights, and weights. The benefit of a set of font styles like this is that it’s very easy to reuse a style in various places. As a result, your application feels much more organized and planned, rather than trying to handle font styles everywhere you need to use them.

The Ext JS Material Design Theme provides the material-font-style function, which allows you to easily set the size, weight, and line height.

User Interactivity

Ripples are an important part of the animation language for Material Design. A ripple is not just aesthetic. It also provides visual feedback that a user has taken an action. Any time a user interacts with a button, a ripple will be created from the point at which they touched or clicked.

This provides feedback that the button has been pressed, but because the ripple is at the point of contact with the user, the user can feel more connected to the application.

A Truly Dynamic Theme

Starting in Ext JS 6.2, CSS variables are first-class citizens. Our core theme, Neptune, has been overhauled and provides this functionality to all themes that extend from it. The Ext JS Material Theme is the first theme to truly use the power of CSS variables and Fashion to allow for instant updates to your application’s theme.

Updating the Material Design Theme can be as simple as changing the base color at runtime. CSS variables are very powerful but are still limited in scope. This is where Fashion comes in to provide dynamic variable recalculation. Simply change your $base-color-name and Fashion will handle recalculations and set the proper CSS variables.

For more information on changing CSS variables with Fashion, check out the Fashion Documentation.

Before dynamically changing the colors of the material theme, you have to add the following to app.json

"material": {
    "toolbar": {
        "color": "#1976d2",
        "dynamic": true
    }
}

app/Application.js

Ext.define('MyApp.Application', {
    extend: 'Ext.app.Application',
    ...
    launch: function() {
        Ext.theme.Material.setColors({
            base: 'red',
            baseWeight: accent: '300',
            accentWeight: '300',
            darkMode: true
        });
    }
});

Signature for the setColors method:

Sets the colors for the Material theme Dynamically with CSS Variables and Fashion

colorsConfig
colorsConfig.base - Name of the base color (red, green, blue, etc)
colorsConfig.baseWeight - Weight for the base color (‘500’, ‘400’, ‘300’, etc)
colorsConfig.accent - Name of the accent color (red, green, blue, etc)
colorsConfig.accentWeight - Weight for the accent color
(‘500’, ‘400’, ‘300’, etc)
colorsConfig.darkMode - Determines if the theme is in Light or Dark Mode

Dark Mode

Another great feature of the Ext JS Material Theme is its ability to seamlessly change into dark mode. Dark Mode maintains all your base and accent color combinations but affects background and text colors.

This customization is not only available during build time but also at runtime via CSS variable dark-mode. This allows you to provide runtime customization for your users to choose the look and feel they like best.

Conclusion

The Ext JS Material Theme will help you modernize your application, giving it a fresh new look, bold colors, and easy color palette customization. Trying the new theme is a simple app.json edit.

Just replace this:

"theme": "theme-mountainview",

With this:

"theme": "theme-material",