Concurrent Rendering Adventures in React 18

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With the release of React 18 we finally get the long awaited concurrent rendering. But how is that going to affect your application? What are the benefits of concurrent rendering in React? What do you need to do to switch to concurrent rendering when you upgrade to React 18? And what if you don’t want or can’t use concurrent rendering yet?

There are some behavior changes you need to be aware of! In this workshop we will cover all of those subjects and more.

Join me with your laptop in this interactive workshop. You will see how easy it is to switch to concurrent rendering in your React application. You will learn all about concurrent rendering, SuspenseList, the startTransition API and more.

This workshop has been presented at React Advanced Conference 2021, check out the latest edition of this React Conference.

FAQ

React 18 focuses on introducing concurrent rendering capabilities that allow for more efficient handling of updates by breaking them into smaller chunks. This helps in managing priorities of rendering tasks and can interrupt lower-priority rendering to handle more urgent updates, enhancing the application's responsiveness.

The 'useTransition' hook in React 18 allows developers to mark updates as non-urgent or low priority. This enables the application to stay responsive by delaying these updates until higher-priority tasks are completed, thus preventing less important updates from blocking the user interface.

The 'suspense list' component in React 18 allows developers to control the order in which multiple suspense boundaries reveal their content. It supports different configurations such as 'forwards', 'backwards', and 'together' to manage how grouped suspense boundaries handle loading states, improving the coordination of loading sequences in complex applications.

The 'startTransition' API in React allows developers to specify non-urgent updates, which can be interrupted if more important updates arrive. This helps in keeping the application responsive by not blocking user interactions with less critical updates, ultimately enhancing user experience by prioritizing more critical tasks.

Yes, 'useTransition' can be used along with 'suspense' in React applications. While 'useTransition' allows for deferring less urgent updates, 'suspense' handles the loading states of components. Using them together can significantly enhance the handling of asynchronous operations and the responsiveness of applications.

React 18 introduces new capabilities for server-side rendering, particularly around the 'suspense' feature, which was previously not supported. This allows developers to use suspense for data fetching on the server, improving the performance and user experience by rendering placeholder content until the data is fully loaded.

While the exact release date for React 18 is not specified, it is expected to be released after an alpha phase, followed by beta and release candidate phases. The release is hoped to be around late 2021 or early 2022, depending on the completion of testing and feedback incorporation.

Maurice de Beijer
Maurice de Beijer
132 min
27 Oct, 2021

Comments

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  • Narges Haeri
    Narges Haeri
    Aspiring Professional
    Thank you so much for such great content. Your workshop was incredibly helpful!

Video Summary and Transcription

The workshop covers the new features of React 17 and React 18, including suspense, error handling, and concurrent mode. It emphasizes the importance of hands-on learning and typing code instead of just copying. The workshop explores using suspense and error boundaries to handle errors and improve the user experience. It also introduces new features in React 18, such as start transition and useTransition, to enhance responsiveness. The interaction between suspense and start transition is discussed, highlighting their collaboration in handling fallback UI and communication.

1. Introduction to Concurrent Rendering

Short description:

Welcome to the workshop on concurrent rendering adventures in React18. I'm Maurice de Beer, a freelance developer instructor and Microsoft MVP. Follow me on Twitter and check out my website for more information. Subscribe to my weekly React newsletter for updates. You'll receive a copy of the slides as well.

Okay, so it's time to get started. Welcome everyone to this workshop on concurrent rendering adventures in React18. Helps if the right window has focus. Who am I? My name is Maurice de Beer, also known as the problem solver. I'm a Microsoft MVP amongst other things, which doesn't mean I work for Microsoft. But I sort of do their marketing for free occasionally, which I guess gives me the bad end of the deal, but they do give me a bunch of free software and other things. Also a freelance developer instructor. I believe in combining the two, because if I develop, then when I teach, I can tell people what really works. When I teach, I have to keep thinking about new things, other ways, better ways of doing things, which keeps me sharp as a developer, so it kind of works well together. Also on Twitter, if you want to follow me, my website is here and you can scan the QR code, you'll get to my website as well and my email address. I also publish a weekly newsletter, React newsletter. We're up to issue something like 310 or something, so I've been doing that for a while. You can scan the QR code here and it will take you to a registration form where you can put in your name and email address. You'll get one newsletter a week, every Wednesday. So the one for today actually went out about an hour ago, but next week another one will go out. I'm not going to use your email for anything else, so don't worry about getting spammed and things like that, or me selling your email address to some other companies. There are huge lists of email addresses leaked by the big companies, so my small list isn't going to be very influential there. And if you don't like the newsletter, you can unsubscribe at any point in time. You will get a copy of these slides, so if you didn't get a chance to scan the QR code or that, you'll get it anyway.

2. Exploring React 17 and React 18 Features

Short description:

We'll explore the new features of React 17 and React 18, including suspense, handling errors, rendering existing applications, suspense list, transitions, and concurrent mode. Please note that we won't cover all the features of React 18, such as server-side rendering with suspense.

So what's the workshop goal? We're going to take a look at what's new with concurrent rendering, suspense, in some degree what's not new. We're going to start off with some stuff in React 17 because what we can do with suspense now is kind of important. So we're going to take a look at how to use suspense, how to paralyze nest suspense, how to handle errors that occur in a suspense boundary. Then we're going to switch to React 18 which is still in preview at the moment, not released yet. We'll see how we can render existing React application in React 18 using CreateRoute. We'll see new capabilities of suspense with things like suspense list and transitions. We'll see what concurrent mode does, how it could potentially influence the performance of your application quite a bit and how you would do that. We'll take a look at some other bits. We're not going to look at everything React 18 has to offer. There is far more. There was a lot of server-side rendering stuff there like currently with React 17 you can't do server-side rendering with suspense. With React 18, if you used to create route API, you can, but that's not something we're going to cover.

QnA

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