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State of React Ecosystem Wrap-Up January 2023

State of React Ecosystem Wrap-Up January 2023

In this State of React Ecosystem event, our panelists discussed the React Roadmap, Best Practices, Redux, Styling Libraries and techniques, Nextjs, and community initiatives!

In this wrap-up, we will take a deeper look into these latest developments and explore what is on the horizon for React. You can watch the full State of React Ecosystem event on the This Dot Media YouTube Channel.

Here is a complete list of the host and panelists that participated in this online event.

Hosts

Panelists

  • Mark Erikson, Senior Front-End Engineer, Replay, Redux maintainer @acemarke

  • Tanner Linsley, VP of UI/UX, nozzle.io, TanStack Creator, @tannerlinsley

  • Dominik Dorfmeister, TanStack Query Maintainer, @TkDodo

  • Ben Ilegbodu, Frontend Architect, Stitch Fix, @benmvp

  • Chantastic, DX Engineer, Chromatic, @chantastic

  • Kathleen McMahon, Senior Design Systems Engineer, Northwestern Mutual, @resource11

Updates from Panelists and what they are currently working on

The event started off with great conversation by getting updates, from our panelists, on what they are currently working on.

Mark Erikson was first, and he talked about how Redux Toolkit 1.9 was shipped back in November 2022. It had new options for RTK Query as well as forms improvements by optimizing the internals. Redux Toolkit 2.0 is currently being developed! It will have breaking changes, and there are some big things coming with the release including modernizing the build output, and updating the package to be fully es module format package defined, and much more!

Redux Toolkit 2.0 alpha 1 has already been shipped, and he is asking for users to try it out, and give feedback.

Kathleen McMahon was next, and talked about how she has been with Nortwestern Mutual and is currently working on standing up their design tokens system as part of the Lunar Design system. She has been enjoying the work of trying to get things into a very big Enterprise level system.

She also got the opportunity to give a couple talks last fall at React Brussels and React Verona where she talked about feature flagging, accessibility, and how to make some widgets accessible. She will be giving a similar talk at React Miami.

Tanner Linsley gave a quick update that he is currently working on Type Safe Routing and has been for over a year learning about the intricacies of how all of that works with type safe everything. He mentioned that there is also going to be a lot of new TanStack packages to play around with.

He has also been recently trying to rebuild all the reactivity engine using SolidJS, and he is working on some smaller libraries at TanStack that are going to be headless.

Dominik Dorfmeister gave an update about what is coming for TanStack Query. In a recent update, they added a Svelte query adapter for TanStack Query. They have pretty much completed the cycle of having one adapter for all the major frameworks. He takes time to share a video that shows Astro with the same query client shared with four different components with each one in a different framework. It shows what you can do when everything works together with the same query client.

He also goes over the roadmap for getting to TanStack Query v5 with it hopefully coming out sometime this year.

Ben Ilegbodu is a Frontend Architect at Stitch Fix on the frontend platform team. He is part of a team that builds out all the platforms and design systems that other teams use to build a site. He has been helping build out the design system using React while documenting in Storybook.

He also talks about how the team has been building a development platform for all the teams to build their apps. They are in the process of moving from Rails to NextJS using a wrapper. He finishes up by talking about working on a monorepo for all of their libraries.

Chantastic talks about how he has been trying to do a little more with Youtube this year. He works at Chromatic which is a company that maintains StorybookJS. They are all working to get to Storybook day which is March 14, 2023. It’s an event that is going to be going over everything that is happening with Storybook 7.

This concluded introduction as the event moved into general questions for the panel.

Panel Questions

Adam got the conversation going to this next part of the event by asking right if React is dying?

The panelists got on this topic and maintained it throughout the rest of the event. Each panelist took the time to explain how it is either frustrating or misunderstood. There is still growth and evolution within the React ecosystem.

With new frameworks and libraries comes a betterment for the community as a whole. They also brought up how the same sorts of things were said about other frameworks like Angular. Overall, there was agreement that React is not dead, but in a time where it is growing to be a better product overall.

Conclusion

The one question that was asked helped bring out an incredible conversation on where React is and where it is going. It is always good to continue to have these discussions in order to stay current or talk about what needs to be done to keep things moving forward for the future of the library. You can watch the full State of React Ecosystem event on the This Dot Media Youtube Channel.