an updated framework that is still fully backwards compatible with existing React-based applications.
The main focus here was to make React as responsive as possible, Facebook engineer — and member of the React core team — Ben Alpert
In addition, it is also launching a rewrite of Relay, its framework for building data-heavy applications.
the plan is to put this rewrite into the hands of developers once React 16.0 launches later this year.
the highlights of this new release are built-in primitives for scheduling and incremental rendering.
But why rewrite React from scratch? “It was not necessarily that the old code base was bad, but we wanted to start with a new foundation that could power everything we do going forward,” Alpert said. That means the new code was developed from the ground up to be extensible, for example.
Relay - framework for building data-driven applications — has also been rewritten with a similar emphasis on performance and extensibility.
Relay combines React with Facebook’s GraphQL query language and now Relay Modern, as the company calls this rewrite, is meant to push this concept further and overcome some of the limitations of the original design.
Relay Modern retains the best parts of Relay — colocated data and view definitions, declarative data fetching — while also simplifying the API, adding features, improving performance, and reducing the size of the framework,” the team explains in today’s announcement.
To do this, the team implemented a number of changes, but most importantly, it adopted static queries and ahead-of-time optimizations.
Static queries essentially ensure that complex queries that aren’t altered by runtime conditions can be pre-built and offloaded to Facebook’s servers. So instead of sending complex queries across the network, all an application has to send is a string that identifies the pre-set query and the variables needed to complete it. Related to this, the ahead-of-time optimization feature in the Relay compiler now looks at the query structure to optimize the query that is now stored on the server to execute it faster — and hence return results to the user faster, too. Other new features in React Modern include built-in garbage collection, for example.
ID: 5734
NAME: facebook-announces-react-fiber
DESCRIPTION: Facebook announces React Fiber, a rewrite of its React framework ] by by Frederic Lardinois (@fredericl) @ techcrunch.com - Larinois outlines some of the key benefits and features of the upcoming replacement for its popular React library
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