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Frontend Report Second Half of November 2024

A second half of November 2024 frontend roundup featuring React Router v7, Tailwind CSS v4 Beta, and Vite 6.0. Explore tools like Next Cloudinary, Extism, and SmarkForm, plus insights on SSR cost-effectiveness, JavaScript Symbols, and new CSS strategies.

React

React Router v7: New features and flexible development options

React Router v7 introduces framework mode with features from Remix, including server rendering and improved type safety. It also includes enhanced templates for starting new projects, and comprehensive upgrade guides for React Router v6 and Remix v2 users.

React Anti-Pattern: Stop Passing Setters Down the Components Tree

Passing useState setters as props can lead to abstraction leaks, reducing clarity and reusability, making it harder to reason about the state. A better approach is to use callback functions to handle state changes, making your code more maintainable and flexible.

Next.js

Next Cloudinary: A game-changer for client-side file handling

Next Cloudinary is a flexible tool that simplifies file handling and image optimization in Next.js applications. It supports various file sources like Google Drive and offers advanced image effects, real-time adjustments, video transformations, watermarking and responsive rendering.

Solito 4.3: Bridge the gap between React Native and Next.js

Solito enables seamless development of universal React Native and web applications by sharing components and navigation across platforms. Built to integrate with Expo and Next.js, it ensures high performance and a consistent user experience across mobile and web.

Others

Mastering JavaScript Symbols: Unique keys, custom behaviors, and advanced usages

Delve into JavaScript Symbols, the powerful tool for creating unique property keys and enabling custom behaviors in your objects. Explore practical applications, from controlling primitive conversions with Symbol.toPrimitive to building specialized arrays with Symbol.species. Learn about their uniqueness, serialization quirks, and how Symbol.for() enables global sharing.

A simple guide to importing JavaScript libraries without a build system

This guide walks you through importing JavaScript libraries like Chart.js and @atcute/oauth-browser-client, covering global variables, ES modules, and CommonJS. It explores using UMD files, ES modules with importmaps, and converting CommonJS modules, highlighting challenges and the importance of a build step for dependency updates.

Evaluating Browser Support: A Framework for Deciding When to Use New CSS Features

Learn a framework to decide on using new CSS features based on browser support. It considers fallback experience, audience-specific browser stats, and risks of broken experiences. Simulate unsupported browsers by removing CSS declarations and use @supports for custom fallbacks when needed.

Crafting a new web performance score: Designing for scalability and clarity

This blog discusses the limitations of using Core Web Vitals (CWV) scores for comparing websites due to their differing units and scales. It introduces CrRRUX, a new metric that normalizes CWV metrics to a 0-1 scale and averages them for a single, comparable performance score within a cohort.

New Tools

Tailwind CSS v4 Beta: Built for speed and modern web development

Tailwind CSS v4 Beta introduces a revolutionary engine with 5x faster full builds and 100x faster incremental builds. Enjoy a unified toolchain, CSS-first configuration, and modern web features like cascade layers, container queries, and popovers.

Vite 6.0: Faster, simpler, more extensible!

Vite 6 brings groundbreaking updates, including a 10M+ weekly npm downloads milestone, faster builds, and a new experimental Environment API for better development experiences. With modern features, broader framework support, and seamless upgrades, it’s the most significant release since Vite 2.

Extism: Unlocking WebAssembly for everyone

Extism is a lightweight, universal framework for building with WebAssembly (Wasm), supporting its use across various platforms. It offers a flexible, plug-in system designed to make all software programmable.

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