react-hook-form VS styled-components

React Hook Form is one of the most popular libraries for building forms in React apps with over 39k stars on GitHub. The library has no external dependencies according to Bundle Phobia.

Link: https://react-hook-form.com/

The idea here is to first define an array of field names for each provider. We'll also need a map with more detailed information about each field. This map will contain the field name, label, type, and validation options. We'll use this map to render the form fields and also to validate the form. Finally, we'll have a Form component that will render the form fields based on their type and handle the form submission. We'll use React Hook Form to handle the form state and validation.

Now we need to install React Hook Form because that is the package we are going to use for building our form. We also need to install the package for SendGrid. cd into the sendgrid-contact-form folder and then run this command to install the packages:

Imagine someone unknowingly unleashing heavy computation on a component without useMemo. That computation will run on every component re-render. Not only that, The dependency array in your hooks (useEffect, useMemo, useCallback) are also checked in each re-render. It's like a double whammy for performance pitfalls! I know that you can avoid this by some technique like what react-hook-form done, but remember thats an extra complexity.

But now, all those difficulties are gone since I found React Hook Form and zod.

This will greatly simplify the handling of AJAX forms in React - like for instance for a search form. But again, this may not be enough to get rid of third-party libraries like React Hook Form, which does much more than just handle form submission (validation, side effects, etc).

We could consider to do all these steps specifically for each data-set; of course this isn't an efficient approach due to the amount of repeated code involved. So what if we could abstract all this in a single management? A way to do this could be using a simple configuration in which we specify each aspect for each input (its type, validations required and so on). And we can do this thanks to the extreme flexibility provided by React Hook Form.

React Hook Form Documentation

CSS-in-JS is a styling technique wherein CSS is composed using JavaScript instead of defined in external files. This method allows CSS to be scoped locally to components rather than globally, reducing the probability of style conflicts. Utilizing JavaScript also enables dynamic styling easily aligned with the component's state or props. Libraries like Styled Components and Emotion are popular choices in the React ecosystem for adopting this method.

In 2023, I had a chat with Max Stoiber, CEO of Stellate, on a podcast to learn about his early success on GitHub. His first open-source project, react-boilerplate/react-boilerplate, gained a whopping 10k stars in just one weekend after appearing on the homepage of Hacker News. This success led Max to drop out of university and create several other popular open-source projects, including styled-components. This library accelerates the process of building styles in React components.

Embracing the styled-components library allows developers to write actual CSS code to style their components. It utilizes tagged template literals to style components, enabling a seamless integration of styles within the component's JavaScript file. This approach eliminates the mapping between components and styles, thus enhancing developer productivity and component reusability.

styled-components: Allows for maintainable styling with CSS-in-JS. Learn more

Over the past few years, I've worked with React apps utilising various CSS-in-JS libraries, starting with styled-components, transitioning through emotion, Theme UI, and finally Stitches. I've also integrated MUI, Mantine, and Chakra in numerous client projects.

There are several alternatives to MUI. shadcn/ui is a modern alternative that is very popular. Ant Design is also a great alternative. Charkra UI can also be used as a UI Framework. Some people suggest just using styled components. Some use Tailwind CSS. Yet, for both styled components and Tailwind CSS, one still writes a lot of CSS. This might not provide the best developer experience compared to using a UI Framework, especially if we aim to avoid designing all the pages on the website.

Website: Styled Components

The project is build using several ready made components available within, Mantine. It’s a fully featured React components library. However some places still use some custom CSS-in-JS so we used some good ol’ styled components.