The Angular team has announced Angular Material beta 8. Angular Material is a project designed to help developers build apps with Angular, and reuse code and abilities for web, mobile, native mobile and native desktop apps.

“Our goal is to build a set of high-quality UI components built with Angular and TypeScript, following the Material Design spec. These components will serve as an example of how to write Angular code following best practices,” the team wrote on its GitHub page.

The latest update features a new component dev kit and the data-table component.

The component dev kit is a standalone package that “will be especially useful for projects that want to take advantage of the features of Angular Material without adopting the Material Design visual language,” according to a blog post. The initial release features accessibility, text directionality, platform detection and dynamic component instantiation.

The data-table component will be available in two implementations: @angular/material and <cdk-table>. According to the team, According to the team, the data-table was the most requested feature for the project.

The <cdk-table> implementation features a fully-templated API, dynamic tables and an accessible DOM structure, according to the team. The @angular/material implementation provides data-table functionality with <md-paginator> and mdSort directives. “These directives provide a UI for pagination and sorting in-line with the Material Design guidelines without being tightly coupled to the data-table itself,” according to the blog post.

Going forward, the team plans to add sticky headers, sticky columns, incremental row rendering and more to the data-table.