When (Not) to Use Server Components in Interactive Web Apps

Calling all React developers! Join us for an immersive 4-hour workshop diving deep into React Server Components and Server Actions. Discover how these game-changing technologies are revolutionizing web development and learn how to harness their full potential to build lightning-fast, efficient applications.

Explore the world of React Server Components, seamlessly blending server-side rendering with client-side interactivity for unmatched performance and user experience. Dive into React Server Actions to see how they combine client-side interactivity with server-side logic, making it easier to develop interactive applications without traditional API constraints.

Get hands-on experience with practical exercises, real-world examples, and expert guidance on implementing these technologies into your projects. Learn essential topics such as the differences between Server and Client Components, optimizing data fetching, passing data effectively, and maximizing performance with new React hooks like useActionState, useFormStatus and useOptimistic.

Whether you're new to React or a seasoned pro, this workshop will equip you with the knowledge and tools to elevate your web development skills. Stay ahead of the curve and master the cutting-edge technology of React 19. Don't miss out - sign up now and unleash the full power of React!

Server-side rendering (SSR) is back in the spotlight – and React is evolving fast. In this workshop, we’ll go deep into the mechanics, performance trade-offs, and modern techniques of SSR with React.js. You'll start by building an SSR app from scratch – no frameworks, just raw renderToString and hydrateRoot—to truly understand how React renders on the server and hydrates on the client. From there, we'll upgrade to React 18’s streaming capabilities using renderToPipeableStream, implement selective hydration using Suspense, and integrate data fetching directly into the server render cycle. We’ll look at React Server Components (RSC), showing how they complement SSR. We'll also cover hydration strategies, how to prevent mismatches, and how to cache or stream HTML effectively for real-world performance. Finally, we’ll bridge our manual SSR work into production frameworks like Next.js.

- 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 continues to evolve their beta capability, React Server Components, and they're continuing to further develop them in partnership with frameworks like NextJS.In this workshop, attendees will learn what React Server Components are, how to effectively build and use them in NextJS, and focus on one of the major advantages of React/NextJS: reusability through components.We will also cover related beta technologies enabled by the `app` directory, such as nested layouts and server actions (alpha/experimental capability).Join us for this hands-on, 120 minute workshop!Technologies:
React, JavaScript/Typescript, NextJS, Miro