As a day-job, React-using person, I like to stay abreast of interesting React news. As such, I save a healthy amount of links. Allow me to dump out my latest pile. Most of this is about React but not all of it.
- The Plan for React 18 — A bunch of people from the React team put this post out giving us all a heads up of what’s coming. Alpha is out, beta is months away. I thought Cassidy’s article on it was the most clear about what we’re likely to care about.
- React Query — Looks like a pretty robust tool… “the missing data-fetching library for React.” Don’t know how I missed it as it even seems more popular than Apollo. I’ve been pretty happy with using Apollo (as a user, my biggest pain is unclear error reporting), and it seems like that’s probabably the right choice if you’re heavy into GraphQL, but React Query looks awfully nice with clear docs and nice DevTools.
- Data Fetching in Redux Made Easy With RTK Query — Matt Stobbs looks at RTK Query, which looks like yet another alternative to the Apollo / React Query stuff.
Take a look at the Redux store in an app you’re working on now. If it’s anything like mine, you’ll see a mix of data from the backend (which is behaving as a cache) and UI state (the data that isn’t persisted when the page reloads). These two types of data are treated as if they are the same, which ends up making both more complicated.
- Just-In-Time translations and code that writes itself — Dan Laush looks at a bunch of modern options for conditional and lazy loading JavaScript. This stuff is probably more complicated than it should be, but it’s getting better. Suspense in React 18 will be helpful. Top-level
awaitis helpful. Load what you need when you need it. Astro is good at this. And, speaking of all this, Nicholas C. Zakas’ “The lazy-loading property pattern in JavaScript” is a great read with a clever pattern for defining objects that only do expensive things once, lazily when asked, then redefine that property on themselves with the result. - Bringing JSX to Template Literals — People think of JSX as a React thing, which is kinda fair, but it’s really a separate thing that can be useful with other frameworks (certainly Preact and even Vue). We looked at how it can be fun with even no framework at all in a previous video. Andrea Giammarchi goes deep here and shows how it can work with the already nicely-ergnomic template literals.
“You can see it working in CodePen via uhtml, uland, ube, or lit-html.”
- React Hooks: Compound Components — Shout out to Kent Dodds! We’ve started using this in our pattern library at CodePen. It’s been nice for keeping components a bit more consolidated rather than a sprawling tree of similarly-named sub components with hand-rolled state sharing.
- JavaScript: What is the meaning of this? — Jake Archibald puts out the canonical article on
this. - Human-Readable JavaScript: A Tale of Two Experts — Laurie Barth compares examples of code that do the same thing, but have different levels of readability. There isn’t always a straight answer
“… but when you’re looking at code that is functionally identical, your determination should be based on humans—how humans consume code.”
- petite-vue — jQuery was amazing and there is plenty of perfectly fine jQuery code, but the reason jQuery is a bit looked down upon these days is the messy code bases that were made with it. Some lessons were learned. While inline JavaScript handlers were once heavily scorned, nearly every popular JavaScript library today has brought them back. But let’s say something like React is too heavy-handed for you—what is the jQuery of light on-page interactivity stuff? Vue sort of walks the line between that and being more of a “big framework.” Alpine.js is probably the main player. But here comes Vue again with a poke at Alpine with a version of itself that is pretty darn small and does the same sort of stuff.