Have a look at the graph above. Laravel and Rails have been around for 13-15 years! The JavaScript frameworks being used in comparison are just getting started, with some of them, like Wasp and Redwood, at similar stages in their development as Laravel and Rails were during their initial years.

RedwoodJS

Document Metadata Support : Define , , and tags directly in components, with React automatically promoting them to the document .

Stylesheet Support : Built-in support for managing stylesheets within the component tree, handling the loading order automatically.

Asynchronous Script Support : Render asynchronous scripts anywhere in the component tree, simplifying script management.

Resource Preloading Support : Introduce preloading APIs like prefetchDNS, preconnect, preload, and preinit to optimize resource loading.

Third-Party Script and Extension Compatibility : Improved compatibility with third-party scripts and browser extensions.

Better Error Reporting : Enhanced error handling with more options for handling errors.

Custom Element Support (Web Components): Improved support for custom elements.

React Compiler

The React Compiler, also known as Forget, is now open source. You can find it at here. It’s built on Rust and you can now try it out in the React 19 beta or in the online Playground:

The impact on developers is that you no longer need to manually optimize using useMemo, useCallback, React.memo API.

This is limited to this, and does not affect dependency rules like useEffect. Currently, you still need to follow React hooks rules (such as only calling hooks at the top level).

When a component is optimized by the compiler, it can show a “Memo ✨” badge in React Devtools (v5.0+):

React for Two Computers

Dan Abramov introduced the respective advantages of React client components and server components, and how you should choose. Here are some summaries:

Server-side component advantages

• Data Access : Server-side components can access data and files on the server, which is useful for data-intensive applications.

• Pre-process Data : Server-side components can read and pre-process data before sending it to the client.

• Build-time Rendering : Server-side components can run at build time to generate static UI, which is beneficial for SEO and initial load performance.

• Simplify Client-side : By processing complex data logic on the server (UI = f(data)), the client-side burden can be reduced, and the client only receives and displays the necessary UI data.

Client-side component advantages:

• Instant Feedback : When users interact with the UI, such as clicking a button, they can get instant feedback without waiting for the server response.

• No Server Polling : For some user operations, such as dragging sliders or clicking buttons, no additional requests or data downloads from the server are needed.

• Better User Experience : Direct interactive response improves the user experience, making the application feel more responsive and smooth.

• Use Client-side State : Components can use client-side state (UI = f(state)), which allows building highly interactive and responsive user interfaces.

React Server Components in Expo Router

Expo Router is a file-based router for React Native and web applications. It allows you to manage navigation between screens in the application, allowing users to seamlessly move between different parts of the application UI on multiple platforms (Android, iOS, and web).

The advantage of server components is that they can send fully interactive dynamic UI to the client, which means the application can provide complex UI elements based on different user actions.

Break React’s Rules

React has some rules:

Charlotte discussed the reasons for these rules to gain a deeper understanding of React’s internal mechanisms.

I recently wrote an article to get a deeper understanding under the hood of React. It uses a simplified Fiber architecture and concurrent mode to avoid blocking the main thread during rendering. From here, you can also understand why these guidelines cannot be broken.

RedwoodJS with React Server Components

RedwoodJS is another full-stack JavaScript application framework with batteries included. It is mainly aimed at startups.

At a high level, it is a React frontend that talks to a custom GraphQL API. The API uses Prisma to interact with the database. Out of the box, you can use Jest for tightly integrated testing, Pino for logging, and Storybook for UI component cataloging. Setting up authentication (like Auth0) or CSS frameworks (like Tailwind CSS) only requires a command line call. In addition, Redwood’s architecture allows you to deploy to serverless providers (such as Netlify, Vercel) or traditional server and container providers (such as AWS, Render).

Conclusion

This is the update from Day 1, which mainly focuses on broad web development. Day 2 is about React Native.

What I am most looking forward to is the React Compiler. Although it is still in testing, if you want to try it in production now, you can apply to join their working group to help provide feedback.

If you find this helpful, please consider subscribing to my newsletter for more insights on web development. Thank you for reading!

Here are more details on the issue I ran into. Upgrading to Node v20.10.0 and running yarn install again fixed my issues without editing any files. Here is what you should ultimately get when visiting http://localhost:8910/:

Frameworks are a theme with this month's Release Radar, so here's another. Redwood is a full-stack, JavaScript/TypeScript web application, designed to scale with you. It uses React frontend for the frontend and links to a custom GraphQL API for the backend. The latest version includes a bunch of breaking changes such as moving to Node 20.0, the Redwood Studio, and highly requested GraphQL features such as Realtime, Fragments, and Trusted Documents, the server file, new router hooks, and heaps more. If you've previously used Redwood, you'll probably want to upgrade to version 7.0. The team have put together a handy migration guide for you to follow.

The other piece of important information to acknowledge here is that when we say RSCs need a framework, “framework” effectively just means “Next.js.” There are some smaller frameworks (like Waku) that support RSCs. There are also some larger and more established frameworks (like Redwood) that have plans to support RSCs or (like Gatsby) only support RSCs in beta. We will likely see this change once we get React 19 and RSCs are part of the Stable version. However, for now, Next.js is currently the only framework recommended in the official React docs that supports server components.

Although there are quite a few opinionated battery-included frameworks that have picked up everything for you like RedwoodJS, Blitz, and Create-T3-App, you still need to choose between them and hope that they will remain mainstream and well-maintained in the future. So how should we choose?

Web development frameworks in JavaScript, such as NextJS and RedwoodJS, have gained popularity among developers. Choosing the right framework, library, or tool for a project is crucial for efficient development. Developers often seek the best tools to save time and avoid reinventing the wheel.

The community here is pretty friendly. https://redwoodjs.com/

Next.js 13 ignited the first wave of attention to React Server Components (RSC) around the end of last year. Over time, other frameworks, like Remix and RedwoodJS, have also started to put RSC into their future road maps. However, the entire "moving computation to the server-side" direction of React/Next.js has been highly controversial from the very beginning.

Current state of web development for some time now includes JS frameworks and libraries springing like mushrooms after the rain. Among these, Next.js has emerged as the most popular choice for any developer that wants to build a beautiful SEO-friendly website. However, as its popularity grows, I noticed Next.js websites are beginning to look eerily similar. In this article, we'll explore the reasons behind this and is this bad or maybe even a good thing.

Further Reading/Resources React Documentation: React Official Site Angular Documentation: Angular Official Site Vue.js Documentation: Vue.js Official Site Svelte Documentation: Svelte Official Site Next.js Documentation: Next.js Official Site

Repository: Next.js

Next.js: npx create-next-app@latest

Remix is a very cool React-based framework that makes the final jump back from the browser to the server. After starting with SPAs that fully ran in the browser, Next.js got the idea of rendering React components in the server, reducing the initial load time and improving crawlability. Remix takes this a step further: while Next.js cannot render dynamic content on the server, Remix can. As a user, this means even faster loadings times for any kind of dynamic content, and as a developer, you don't need to think about server-side vs client-side components. You just write React code, and it works.

Here is the tricky situation and that's why CRA is in a semi-dead state, it has not been deprecated but isn't receiving any updates not even security updates, along with that the new React.dev documentation doesn't mention CRA but suggests using React meta-frameworks like Next and Remix for new projects. You can read more about React's reasoning for it in this github issue discussion.

Probably the most known example https://github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions/19065

It was not an issue if you host in Vercel, as they provide the image optimization as a premium feature.

Implementing the requested feature would make the framework much better when self-hosted elsewhere. But there is neglection to resolve the issue. This is just one case.

This Reactjs version also includes React Server Components, so you can easily render components on the server. If you’re familiar with Next.js, whose components are server components by default, this is the same idea. Server components have advantages such as faster page load time, better SEO optimization, and overall better performance.

Next.js - for creating the application’s user interface and backend.