Building Reusable Server Components in NextJS

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to build a Next.js app that uses Apollo Client to fetch data from a headless WordPress backend and use it to render the pages of your app. You’ll learn when you should consider a headless WordPress architecture, how to turn a WordPress backend into a GraphQL server, how to compose queries using the GraphiQL IDE, how to colocate GraphQL fragments with your components, and more.

- Introduction- Prerequisites for the workshop- Fetching strategies: fundamentals- Fetching strategies – hands-on: fetch API, cache (static VS dynamic), revalidate, suspense (parallel data fetching)- Test your build and serve it on Vercel- Future: Server components VS Client components- Workshop easter egg (unrelated to the topic, calling out accessibility)- Wrapping up

This workshop will guide you through the product development life cycle of creating a real-world web application. You will learn about React Server Components, building a design system within Storybook, and using frontend development to approach becoming a full-stack developer. The workshop will cover increasing confidence in your application with unit tests and implementing authentication and authorization. You'll have the opportunity to work through product features and examine a real-world RedwoodJS project, gaining valuable experience in real-world product development. RedwoodJS makes it simple to approach full-stack development, and this workshop will give you the skills you need to create your own real-world web applications.

The developer ecosystem is always moving fast and this year has proved no exception. React Server Components can offer a significant improvement to developer experience and to application performance. But I think it's fair to say that this new server-first paradigm can be tricky to wrap your head around!In the first half of this workshop, we'll explore React Server Components from the ground-up: building our own mini meta-framework to help us understand how RSCs work. We'll discover exactly what is produced by an RSC build and we'll connect those pieces together to form a full application.Next, we'll deploy it! Cloudflare have also had a busy year too — Smart Placement, in particular, is a new technology that we've developed which fits the RSC model perfectly. We'll explore why that makes sense for our workshop app, and we'll actually deploy it onto the Cloudflare Developer Platform.Finally, we'll build out our app a little further, using D1 (our serverless SQL database) to really show off the React Server Component's power when combined with Smart Placement.You should come away from this workshop with a greater understanding of how React Server Components work (both behind-the-scenes and also how you as a developer can use them day-to-day), as well as insight into some of the new deployment patterns that are now possible after recent innovations in the platform space.

- React Bricks: why we built it, what it is and how it works- Create a free account- Create a new project with Next.js and Tailwind- Explore the directory structure- Anatomy of a Brick- Create a new Brick (Text-Image)- Add a title and description with RichText visual editing- Add an Image with visual editing- Add Sidebar controls to edit props (padding and image side)- Nesting Bricks using the Repeater component- Create an Image gallery brick- Publish on Netlify or Vercel- Page Types and Custom fields- Access Page meta values- Internationalization- How to reuse content across pages: Stories and Embeds- How to create an E-commerce with Products’ data from an external database and landing pages created visually in React Bricks- Advanced enterprise features: flexible permissions, locked structure, custom visual components

If you’re like me, you probably have a million side-project ideas, some that could even make you money as a micro SaaS, or could turn out to be the next billion dollar startup. But how do you know which ones? How do you go from an idea into a functioning product that can be put into the hands of paying customers without quitting your job and sinking all of your time and investment into it? How can your solo side-projects compete with applications built by enormous teams and large enterprise companies?
Building rich SaaS products comes with technical challenges like infrastructure, scaling, availability, security, and complicated subsystems like auth and payments. This is why it’s often the already established tech giants who can reasonably build and operate products like that. However, a new generation of devtools are enabling us developers to easily build complete solutions that take advantage of the best cloud infrastructure available, and offer an experience that allows you to rapidly iterate on your ideas for a low cost of $0. They take all the technical challenges of building and operating software products away from you so that you only have to spend your time building the features that your users want, giving you a reasonable chance to compete against the market by staying incredibly agile and responsive to the needs of users.
In this 3 hour workshop you will start with a simple task management application built with React and Next.js and turn it into a scalable and fully functioning SaaS product by integrating a scalable database (PlanetScale), multi-tenant authentication (Clerk), and subscription based payments (Stripe). You will also learn how the principles of agile software development and domain driven design can help you build products quickly and cost-efficiently, and compete with existing solutions.