This Week In React #103: Contentlayer, Remotion 3, Stale Closure, Cross-platform, Jest 28, Hydration, Netlify Edge Functions...
React
Contentlayer: Content Made Easy for Developers (beta)
Contentlayer is a new system that offers to manage the glue between your content (Markdown, CMS, Notion...) and your code. You define a schema, and it will validate/compile your content and efficiently generate a .contentlayer folder with TypesScript types, and the content ready to be imported directly into your app. This seems to improve build performance significantly (up to x2 even even with cold caches). The beta has an official Next.js integration reduces the amount of glue code. I recommend watching the intro intro video (5min) to understand how it works in a Next.js context. A new project by Johannes Schickling, also creator of Prisma, also working on the glue between code and DB.
Remotion 3.0
Remotion allows you to create videos programmatically, with React (web) code and data/props. After 10 months of development, v3.0 has just been released (trailer) and the main new feature is the new support for serverless rendering on AWS Lambda, which allows you to scale, reduce costs, and produce videos much faster!
Hooks, Dependencies and Stale Closures
Interactive article to help fully understand the stale closure problem in React. If you use memoization and do not respect the ESLint exhaustive-deps rule, you risk introducing this type of problem in your codebase, and it is not always easy to debug!
The challenges of rendering an OpenLayers map in a popup through React
An interesting feedback on rendering a React app in several windows via portals. There are advantages (a single state to control all the windows) but also some challenges to solve.
Extras:
📜 File-based routing with React Location — Nested layouts: the creator of Generouted continues his series on implementing a home-made file-based routing. Here he shows how to implement nested layouts (inspired by Remix) based on Vite and React-Location.
📜 React Component Composition Explained: composition can help solve drilling props and improve performance.
📜 Upgrading to React 18 with TypeScript: summary of TypeScript breaking changes coming with React 18, and how to automate the migration via codemod.
📜 Flexible Design System Components With "as/is" Props: useful technique to use a component with different HTML tags depending on the context:
<span>,<h1>...📜 Introduction to React v18 Suspense and Render-as-You-Fetch approach: using React 18 new features to avoid waterfalls.
🐦
next/linkwill no longer require<a>as a child: looks like a nice quality of life improvement 😉🧵 Sebastian Markbåge: "Hydration in React was originally not built for SSR": there's been interesting hydration discussions this week, probably in reaction to this Misko Hevery article (creator of Qwik/Angular)
🧵 Alex Russell on CSS-in-JS: fair criticism of runtime-based CSS-in-JS libs
📦 Create-React-App Redux Template v2: update React 18
📦 Jest-Preview: new solution that integrates with React-Testing-Library to visually see your tests run and debug them more easily.
📦 Rive-React: React bindings for the Rive animation platform
💸 Sponsors
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After two long years, App.js Conf is coming back as an in-person event! Meet the creators of React Native & Expo, learn from the best and simply have fun with other devs from all around the world! Our line-up is full of mobile development professionals ready to share their knowledge. See our amazing speakers here!
In addition to the two-day conference, we also prepared full-day practical workshops! There are still some tickets left for two of our workshops:
Modern intro to app development with React and Expo by Lydia Hallie & Evan Bacon;
Setting up a professional development process with Expo and EAS hosted by the Expo team themselves!
You can now book the workshop tickets with a 20% exclusive discount for This Week in React subscribers! Use the code ThisWeekinReact20 or follow this link to book your spot.
PS: I'm going there this year 😉
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React-Native
Migrating React And Native Apps To React Native
Callstack engineers explain how to adopt React-Native for an existing app, with 2 different approaches: greenfield (full rewrite) and brownfield (incremental migration). Also evokes how to port a web application to React-Native.
Writing cross-platform components for web and React Native
Artem gives some ideas for cross-platform web/mobile development. He suggests using primitive components, and taking a web-first approach for DX reasons: developing in the browser and testing with Cypress, then verifying that the mobile app works.
Extras:
🎙️ React-Native-Radio 232 - Flutter is better than React Native...in all the ways that don’t matter
🎙️ The React Native Show Podcast: Coffee Talk #1 - React v18.0 & React Native 0.68
👥 React-Native EU: Call-For-Papier open until end of Mai
Partners
Start React Native: learn everything about gestures and animations with William Candillon
Adventures in Nodeland: Matteo writes about his journey as a Node.js TSC member and maintainer of 500+ modules on npm, including Fastify and Pino!
TypeScript Weekly: the best TypeScript links every week, right in your inbox
ES.next News: learn about the latest in JavaScript and cross-platform tools
Tailwind Weekly: all things Tailwind CSS, new issue every Saturday
G2i: pre-vetted remote React & React-Native developers you can trust on contract or full-time basis
Infinite Red: US React-Native experts making your idea a reality
Software Mansion: the co-creators of React Native and the technological core of many tech companies
Other
Jest 28: Shedding weight and improving compatibility
Lots of cool things in this release! My highlights:
Sharding support to parallelize test execution
Full support for package
"exports"GitHub Actions Reporter looks very convenient
ESM support still blocked
jest-runner-tsd: for testing TypeScript types
jest-light-runner: 2x faster on Babel codebase
Building a JavaScript Bundler
Christoph Nakazawa explains how to create a JavaScript bundler, based on some existing Jest packages. Reading JavaScript files, creating the dependency graph, the bundle runtime, final bundle assembly... A technical reading that greatly demystifies the internal workings of a simple bundler.
Netlify Edge Functions (beta)
After a failed attempt (Edge Handlers), Netlify releases a new serverless @ Edge offer with its Edge Functions in beta, based on the Deno Deploy infrastructure, and thus more compatible with web standard APIs. This allows in particular to run React meta-frameworks using server-side code more optimally: Remix, Next.js (only middleware for now), Hydrogen, Server Components, Astro...
Hydration is Pure Overhead
The creator of Qwik/Angular continues to question the hydration model of our server-side rendered SPAs, and pushes to adopt another more efficient model, based on "resumability".
Extras:
