Tom Occhino - React Fiber, Create React App, and React Community - Keynote Part 4 - React Conf 2017

[Applause] yeah that's awesome I'm really excited about fiber we've been working on it for a little while now I think the whole team's been working on it for about six months Sebastian's been experimenting for a little bit longer along with Jordan walk some early prototypes and things like that but I really see fiber as a new foundation for react it's going to set us up for the next several years worth of improvements and Innovation that are going to happen in react and in the react ecosystem now the scheduling Primitives and the new data structures and algorithms are exciting but there's also a couple of other things that I

think are exciting that are you know probably not worth Sebastian talking about so I'll come up and and talk really briefly about those one of them is this concept that we call error boundary this is actually born out of our server side infrastructure at Facebook the idea is that if part of your application fails but it's in sort of an isolated place we shouldn't have to take out the whole app we should be able to fail in an isolated way and handle that failure gracefully and so aab boundary allows you to sort of put you know a seam in your application around a certain component or a sub tree

and it makes it so that you can handle that better than the default of just unmounting the whole tree we've had this support in react for a little while now but the support in fiber is a lot better it's comprehensive and I'm really excited about this um perhaps the the feature that everybody has been really waiting for though as the number one requested feature of react since we released it uh is the ability to return multiple compon components from render you can so this would have been really hard

to implement in the old version of react but we knew that we needed to get this into the next version of react and so fiber was sort of designed around the the idea that we need to have this so now you can return arrays and strings from render you don't have to do that weird dance with like your table rows and all this other stuff anymore it's going to be awesome one other thing that I'm really excited about was you know we've long had a problem of the approachability of the react core we don't get as many contributions to the react core as we want to because it's really hard codebase to follow along there's years worth of you know ation and changes and

things in there and so when we set out to build fiber we wanted to make it significantly more approachable and easier to contribute to one big thing we did here is the whole react core all of fiber is all written in flow now so we can make changes to it with more confidence that we're not going to break the world uh this has been working really well apparently Leeland another shout out for you uh he tweeted the other day that the uh he's pleasantly surprised at how approachable the code base was I can't believe someone actually said that about react react has kind of been historically pretty crazy to try and contribute to so this is

awesome fiber is not quite ready yet but uh you can follow along at is fiber ready yet.com if you want to uh you want to put some pressure on the team here myself included couple boxes there won't be filled in for a little while but again we are running this on facebook.com uh it's working pretty well we're really excited about it uh we're going to keep going one last thing that we've worked on over the past year that I want to mention real quick that has sort of changed my life is create react app uh we've known for a very long time that we needed a really good CLI for

react you know Frameworks like Ember had a good CLI from the beginning a great CLI we haven't really had one for react and now we finally do uh for myself you know as a manager I don't make enough time to write code anymore uh and I certainly don't have a lot of time to configure development environments and you know packaging configurations and all these things uh and so create react app has enabled me to start coding again which you know for better or worse I don't know if the team's excited about it but I am so I think this is as good a time as I need to pour one out for JavaScript

fatigue uh you weren't with us long but we're we're glad you're gone uh okay finally just a couple of quick thank yous you know I've been involved in planning of this conference for the past couple of years but this year I gained a new found appreciation for how much time and energy actually goes into uh preparing for an event like this and there's just a couple people I really want to quickly thank our events team Christina and myen also Jenny and a bunch of other folks fntech that put all of this stuff together the stages and everything going on Backstage absolutely