📨 #193: State of React, Server Functions, next/form, useId, Astro, Meteor, Gluestack, React-Aria, Turbopack, Airbnb, Apollo, DRY, IDX, Bootsplash, Flash Calendar, CSS, ES, Poku...

July 24, 2024 · 9 min read

Sébastien Lorber

Newsletter Editor - Docusaurus maintainer

Benedikt Müller

Indie Hacker

Hi everyone!

This week the State of React survey results are finally out, and they are full of interesting insights.

I found some great articles on abstractions in React, as well as feedback and case studies from various React and React Native companies.

Astro has released Server Islands, and it looks like a pretty simple but compelling solution to rival with Next.js Partial Prerendering, on which Vercel also published a great article. There's also the Renaissance of Meteor to look forward to, React Aria releases, and a v2 of Gluestack-UI for Universal React Native devs.

Do you like TypeScript and web dev tooling in general? Check out Squiggle Conf (🇺🇸 Boston - 03 & 04 October), offering us a 10% discount with code “TWIR”. Great speakers have already been announced!

💡 Check this newsletter on Twitter - visual format 🎨

As always, thanks for supporting us on your favorite platform:

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People always ask how I keep up to date, it's This Week In React.

Jack HerringtonPrincipal Engineer - Youtuber

💸 Sponsor

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⚛️ React

State of React 2023 - Survey Results

The very first State of React survey results are finally online. The data was collected in November 2023, and it took a while for the results to be published. It's a great tool for analyzing the trends in our beloved framework ecosystem. And it will become even better next year to see how those trends evolve. Without further ado, here are my picks:

The adoption of hooks has been largely successful
Very positive signals for React Query, Zustand, Radix UI, React Aria, shadcn/ui, tRPC, Zod
No clear React framework winner. Next.js is the most popular but has slightly lower retention than Astro and Remix
React renderer usage shows that React is not only React-DOM. More than 30% use React Native, and 9% use React-Three-Fiber.
Only 7% have ever used my favorite underrated hook useSyncExternalStore
This Week In React is the 5th most popular resource in the "Blogs & Magazines" category (❤️️ thanks!)

The next State of React 2024 survey is planned for September 2024 and now is the time to get involved in the survey design.

💸 Reactile – a new approach to React-based web apps. Create your own views. Let it handle your windows and widgets in a single browser tab
👀 Next.js PR - next/form
🗓️ React-Brussels - 🇧🇪 Brussels - 18 October - Some speakers have already been revealed ! Check out now, and apply 10% discount with code “TWIR”.
📜 Data Fetching with Server Actions in Next.js: You can use Server Actions to fetch client data using React-Query. There are limitations to consider though: they use POST requests and run sequentially. FYI a "use server" function called outside a transition is not a Server Action, but a Server Function.
📜 Use useId() Instead Of Hand-Making IDs: IDs are useful for accessibility, but you’d rather avoid creating them manually if you want to mount a component twice, or have good support for React hydration. To access DOM elements, useRef is enough.
📜 Do not pass DTOs to UI components: Explain why you’d rather design component props shapes independently, instead of blindly using your backend payloads as props.
📜 DRY – the common source of bad abstractions: Greatly illustrates how React devs could end up creating the wrong abstractions. React UI libraries learned over the years to not over-abstract and give you great flexibility through composition.
📜 Turbopack updates: Moving homes: The Turbopack bundler is moving to the Next.js repository. Co-location will help the team iterate faster on production builds (currently 92%-ready!). Turbopack will remain a framework-agnostic standalone bundler: once ready, it will be moved back to a separate repository.
📜 Vercel - How to choose the best rendering strategy for your app: Great overview of all the rendering strategies (SSG, SSR, ISR, CSR), their tradeoffs, and best practices. Using Partial Pre-Rendering builds on top of the strategies above. Using Next.js with Server Components and Suspense boundaries makes your app future-proof for selecting the best rendering strategy for each component.
📜 How Airbnb Smoothly Upgrades React: Airbnb recently upgraded their frontends from React 16 to React 18. Using a “React Upgrade System”, relying on shared infrastructure code and an incremental migration and rollout strategy.
📜 Fine-grained Markdown: Interactive article from the creator of Code Hike (based on MDX) showing how we can decorate Markdown and extend it in a typesafe way to make it a richer medium.
📜 Data fetching in useEffect vs Remix loader
📜 Integrating Next.js with New Relic
📜 Clean(er) React Architecture (Part 8) - How Does React-Query Fit Into The Picture?
📜 Zoom - Why we chose T3 stack to build our reference apps on Web
📦 Astro 4.12 - Server Islands: Astro released a great new Server Islands feature that renders a placeholder on the server, and replaces it independently with dynamic content afterward, enabling you to render the rest of your site statically. This is an alternative approach to the Next.js model, planning to solve this with React Server Components + Suspense + Partial Pre-Rendering. Their demo is a rebranded fork of the Next.js PPR one and outperforms it!
📦 Meteor.js 3.0: Meteor just released a new major version that drops the legacy Fibers coroutines in favor of async/await, upgrade to Node 20 and integrates Express. This new version claims to be Renaissance of Meteor.js, with launch events starting on July 29th. I’ve never used Meteor, and curious to know what place it will take alongside the modern React frameworks we have today.
📦 React Aria July 22 release - React 19 ready, virtualization improvements, toast focus management improvements, Color Picker RC
📦 Apollo Client 3.11 - Subscription improvements, React 19 + compiler support, new testing library, new Devtools options
📦 eslint-plugin-use-server - Disallows top level "use server"
🧩️ Design GUI - Browser Extension for managing colors in CSS Variables - Support for shadcn/ui
🎥 React Summit 2024 - All the talks are online
🎥 dotJS 2024 - YouTube playlist with talks from Malte Ubl, Mark Dalgleish and more
🎥 Sam Selikoff - How to build a Recursive React Component
🎥 Web Dev Simplified - How To Debug React Apps Like A Senior Developer
🎙️ Why you should use Redux in 2024 with Mark Erikson

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My favorite resource for keeping up with the React community!

Evan BaconEngineering Manager - Expo

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📱 React-Native

This section is authored by Benedikt.

Gluestack-UI v2 - Universal copy/paste components for Expo/Next

Gluestack-UI offers universal components and patterns for React, Next.js & React Native to copy & paste. The recently released v2 is a major update that focuses on performance optimization, reduced dependencies, and RSC compatibility. It’s based on Tailwind CSS (for web) and NativeWind (for native). Due to its copy & paste approach, upgrading is not as easy as bumping a dependency, but they have a straightforward tutorial and a code mod to help with the upgrade. To give you a glimpse of v2, they even released a little 🐦 trailer on X.