server-components-demo VS moment

I, along with many ReactJS devs, have been following the development of the "new" React Server Components API with excitement. It solves some common problems in React around data fetching and efficiency in client side applications. If you're interested in learning more about the API I'd recommend you listen to the recent JS Party podcast with Dan Abramov and Joe Savona from the React Team on the future of React, and then check out the React Server Components Demo on GitHub.

I borrowed this piece of code from the React Server Components demo Notes application.

And perhaps most importantly, one of the biggest limitations of RSC at this time is their out-of-the-box support. Currently, the React team has partnered with Vercel/NextJS to develop some boilerplate functionality within the NextJS structure (still experimental). Note: This boilerplate demo app was developed in the early stages of RSC, and will be replaced by the Layouts RFC going forward.

See the README for how to install the demo. https://github.com/reactjs/server-components-demo

Let’s use this example of a server component:

For example, as I started to play around with the React team’s Server Components demo, I realized I had to fundamentally change how I approached building components. Instead of just creating a new file and typing export const MyComponent = () => {}, I now had to start thinking about how the component would be used, to help determine whether it was a better fit for the client or the server.

If you want to play around with the demo code for React Server Components, you can find this code on GitHub.

As we see in the demo app, the server component is rendered in a special format which can be read by the client. We can see the special format in the below image

I'm looking forward to trying out React server components (I plan to fork the React team's demo and play with it), but I don't see myself having a heavy use for it in my everyday life. I'm not currently working on any personal projects that require interactivity, and for the projects I'm working on, server-side rendering is probably a better way to reduce my bundle size.

To learn more about Moment.js, please visit their official website.

Ah, Moment.js, the guardian angel of date and time manipulation. Ever needed to format a date, calculate durations, or display something like "2 days ago"? Moment.js has got your back. It's a lifesaver for anything date and time-related, making it a must-have in your project, especially if you're into making your users feel like you really get them.

After hours of trying to figure out why Jekyll was still showing "Today" for a post I modified last week, I remembered that I am using the timeago filter from jekyll-timeago plugin. I was rendering the dates using {{ doc.last_modified_at | timeago }}. As you know, Jekyll is a static site generator, and it renders this as HTML at the time of build, and only then. This means any date rendered with timeago is hardcoded as is in the HTML and won't change until the next build. I switched all the dates to the "%-d %b %y" format for now. Might use moment.js in the future to get the timeago dates back.

moment: Handles date and time manipulations with ease. Learn more

For the longest time working with dates in JavaScript was a huge pain. That’s why libraries such as moment.js or date-fns are so popular. A lot of times I’d reach for these libraries when working with relative time formatting, but since late last year we’ve had pretty great browser support for the RelativeTimeFormat() method. In my mind, relative dates are just more visually appealing, especially for working with dates internationally. Dates like "5 days ago" or "in 2 months" are far more intuitive for users than 12/12/2023, or 03/11/2027. Folks in the US will see that as March 11, 2027, whereas the rest of the world will see that as November 03, 2027. What a nightmare.

İ am using moment js for a long time. You can check it also. https://momentjs.com/

We could control the DST flip by setting the test's input time to the appropriate time of year (summer/winter). However we couldn't control the timezone. We had to adjust the expected data in the test 🤢 using the same library which the production code used (momentjs).

8. Moment.js

This may sound a bit general but we can't forget about well-tought code. If we are using a lot of external dependencies, we can check if there aren't many lighter alternatives. Example? Some people are still using moment.js for date formatting. Why not use a lightweight 2kb alternative instead? Writing clean, organized and maintainable code won't give us a huge score boost but we are trying to save every byte of data, right? 😉