This Week In React #207: Next.js, shadcn/ui, Headless UI, RN 0.76, New Architecture, NativeWind, RNTL, Reassure, Bottom Tabs...

Hi everyone!

This is another great React week.

Vercel has unveiled new super-interesting caching APIs for Next.js, and the React Native ecosystem is on fire!

On my side, I'm a bit tired of Twitter penalizing me for commenting external links. I'm giving Bluesky a try (@sebastienlorber.com). Come say hi if you are there.

Don't forget to fill in the State of React survey, and mention that you read the newsletter 😇.

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Next.js Conf 2024 Recap

Last week, the community gathered at the Next.js conference. This recap is a nice overview of the highlights, including:

Next.js 15 stable
Turbopack Dev stable
Simpler caching, reduced complexity
Self-hosting improvements and templates

The sister blog post Our Journey with Caching is particularly interesting, introducing new experimental caching semantics and APIs such as use cache, cacheTag, and cacheLife. It’s a more flexible system, and super cool that you don’t even need to provide a cache key.

💸 Product for Engineers - A/B testing mistakes I learned the hard way
📖 Using shadcn/ui with Next.js 15 and React 19: Explains how to handle peer deps, gives status of React 19 support of underlying libs.
📣 Netlify Joins OpenNext: They moved their adapter to the OpenNext org and started collaborating with Cloudclare and SST to make Next.js more portable.
🗓️ React Day Berlin - 🇩🇪 Berlin - 13 & 16 December - Free remote tickets are available now, click here !
📜 Live Streaming with React — More Rust in the JavaScript Ecosystem: This innovative project uses a custom React renderer to control a media server doing live video mixing. The article explains their implementation decisions.
📜 Conditional React hooks pattern: Maintainer of Headless UI shares trick he uses in the library, passing enabled as first parameter to hooks.
📜 HTML Form Validation is heavily underused: Creates a convenient React abstraction on top of input.setCustomValidity.
📜 Using Shadcn UI without a Tailwind Config File: Use Tailwind v4 (alpha) with shadcn/ui in a Next.js 15 app. Unfortunately you’ll have to copy/paste the components/dependencies manually until the CLI gets updated.
📜 Add an RSS Feed to a Next.js Blog: Use a static route returning XML. Note I beg you to add an RSS feed, otherwise I have to pay Inoreader 0.20€/month to track your blog through selectors 😅.
📜 How to roll your own auth in JavaScript & TypeScript: Step-by-step guide to implement auth in Next.js 15.
📜 useContextSelector: Speeding Up React Apps With Large Context
📜 When to use redirect() vs. router.push() in Next.js
📜 How To Set Up Next.js 15 For Production In 2024
📦 Headless UI 2.2 - React 19 support
📦 MDX 3.1
📦 Medusa 2.0 - Next.js and Remix starters: This open source alternative to Shopify launched new major version, including various React-based e-commerce storefront starters.
🎥 Alem Tuzlak - When are React Server Components finally coming to React Router!?
🎥 UI Engineering - Why "Stale Closure" Misleads React Devs

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📱 React-Native

React Native 0.76 - New Architecture by default, DevTools, and more

React Native 0.76 is out with major updates! The New Architecture is now enabled by default, there's a new React Native DevTools for improved debugging, and CSS support for boxShadow and filter for enhanced UI effects (available only with the new architecture). Be aware of some breaking changes: minimum SDK requirements have been raised to iOS 15.1 and Android SDK 24 (Android 7). Time to upgrade and check it out!

v0.76 is cool, but what’s even better is that the New Architecture is here and officially declared ready to be used in production! This is a multi-year effort and a huge milestone for the React Native ecosystem! At this point, you probably already heard about JSI, Fabric, Turbomodules, synchronous low-overhead bridgeless communication, interop mode, and more. It’s not just about performance, but also solving important UX/DX problems such as being able to measure views synchronously to position a tooltip, or having useLayoutEffect work like on the web. What excites me most is also probably the most underrated: React Native can finally use React 18+ concurrent features, notably transitions, Suspense, and what’s coming next.