Front-End Fire

The first topic of conversation this week is an unexpected new area the Expo team is tackling: Expo Application Service Hosting. EAS Hosting is a new service for quickly deploying web projects built using Expo and React Native apps. It makes it easy to compile and sign apps with custom native code, upload apps to the Play Store or App Store, and push live app updates directly to users. The Interop...

This episode begins with a cautionary tale to double check your browser extensions. Popular coupon browser extension Honey’s been caught replacing affiliate links with its own tracking codes right before checkout, as well as applying pre-selected discount codes from its business partners that aren’t always the best deals. A few weeks ago we reported Deno is petitioning Oracle to release the JavaSc...

To start us off, the State of JS 2024 survey results were recently released, and there’s lots of interesting stats to share. Vite continues to be the most loved framework and build tool amongst all JS devs, React continues to be the most used framework amongst JS devs at work, and SvelteKit and Astro are the two meta frameworks JS devs are most interested in trying out. Fun fact: 67% of respondent...

We wrap up the podcast with an end of year holiday spectacular episode! Instead of the usual news, the hosts share the biggest front end stories of 2024, the most fascinating developments, and the moments that made us happiest. Thank you, Front-End Fire listeners! We couldn’t have done this without you. Wishing you a wonderful holiday season, and we can’t wait to bring you more frontend goodness i...

In our last news episode of the year, we share that React 19 is declared stable, just in time for the holidays. It’s been a long road from release candidate in April to stability now, but it was well worth the wait. React 19 is packing a lot of features, including: Actions, hooks, form actions, the new use API, and of course, React Server Components and Server Actions. OpenAI’s been busy as well,...

The new JavaScript package manager and serverless registry vlt debuted recently, promising to be a drop-in replacement for existing package managers like npm with additional offerings like a dependency query syntax selector and GUI experience for dependency graphs. Vite 6.0 released this week, and its biggest improvement is the new experimental Environment API. The Environment API is designed so t...

Co-host Jack Herrington is just back from the React Summit conference in New York and he shares some of the highlights of the conf, including the announcement that TanStack Start is now in beta status and Tanner Linsely (the creator of the TanStack products) will be working on it full time. Additionally, React-based animation library Framer Motion announces it has spun off into open source library...

We kick off this week’s episode with news that React Native framework Expo now has a developer preview of universal React Server Components. For the first time ever, you can use React Server Components & Server Actions in native apps.  In a controversial move, Amazon has mandated all employees must return to offices by Jan 2025. The hosts discuss the pros and cons of working from the office vs...

The AI race continues with lots of new updates straight from the GitHub Universe conference! New features from GitHub include: the ability to choose different AI models for GitHub Copilot Chat to use (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, etc.), Copilot Workspaces reviewing PRs, suggesting code changes, and validating fixes. In addition to the GH Universe announcements, the October VS Code release has a bunch o...

In a special guest episode, Rob Eisenberg joins the podcast to talk about the role web components play in today’s web development ecosystem. Rob is uniquely qualified to discuss web components, as the former architect for Microsoft’s web component tech stack, FAST, used by about 1,500 internal MSFT teams, and creator of the Web Component Engineering course.  Special Guest(s): Rob Eisenberg, Founde...

Jack is away this week speaking at the React Advanced conference in London , so be sure to check out his recorded talk (and all the others) about if React is really dying. For the news this week, we’ve got a bunch of interesting topics, the first of which is the latest release of Next.js: Next 15. It’s stable and production ready offering React 19 and React Compiler (experimental) support, Turbopa...

In the new frameworks based on React, we introduce you to One. It is a Vite-powered project claiming to support React web apps and React Native apps all in one. Next, Host Jack Herrington shares an update on how Astro’s Server Islands work after trying them out for himself. Similar to React’s Suspense components, Astro’s Server Islands allow any component that relies on server data to render with...

.io domains have been in vogue for over a decade, but now that the British government has decided to give up sovereignty over the small set of islands in the Indian Ocean that owned that country code on the Internet, it will soon cease to exist.  Evan You, of Vue JS and Vite fame, has started a new company VoidZero Inc. to build the next generation toolchain for JavaScript. While trying to make Vi...

WP Engine is taking Automattic and Matt Mullenweg to court. The complaints are numerous and juicy: extortion, libel, slander, and include screenshots of text messages, tweets, and emails that look pretty damning against Automattic. The whole story has “Made for TV documentary” written all over it. In slightly less controversial news, React 19 has renamed its Server Actions to Server Functions. Thi...

This episode kicks off with the new Deno 2 release candidate. V2 boasts improved dependency management, updates to the APIs and CLI, and improved CommonJS support because even though ESM is the future, so much good stuff in the JS ecosystem still runs on CJS.  Web Components take a big step forward in terms of wider spread adoption with the adoption of the Declarative Shadow DOM by all major brows...

Tanner Linsley, creator of TanStack Query and TanStack Router, continues expanding the Tanner-verse with a new TanStack Start framework. It’s a full-stack React framework powered by TanStack Router, Vinxi, and Vite, and boasts all the mainstays of a JavaScript framework today, including SSR, streaming, server function support, RPCs, and more.  With the release of the new Apple operating system, iO...

Big news this week when it’s announced that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has moved ChatGPT from using Next.js to using Remix. While both metaframeworks rely on React under the hood, Remix seems a bit less opinionated about how teams might want to structure their projects to best suit their unique use cases and needs. TypeScript has also released v5.6, and amongst the many improvements is on...

Kicking off the discussion is the release of Vue 3.5. Although it’s not a major release, Vue 3.5 packs some great new features and optimizations like: reactivity system improvements (up to 56% less memory usage for apps than before), reactive prop destructuring stabilization (it’s simpler to declare props with default values), and SSR improvements like lazy hydration for async components. RedwoodJ...

We’ve got a good show for you today! It’s chock full of new build tools, better date handling in JavaScript, and SSR benchmarks to prove which framework is truly the fastest. The rust-ification of JavaScript build tools continues, as next generation build tool Rspack hits v1 and claims it’s ready for primetime. Rspack boasts (almost) complete compatibility with the webpack API while also being 10x...

On this week’s episode, a new software licensing term has emerged in the development world: Fair Source Software (FSS).  The error and exception tracking software company Sentry added some legal protections to their Codecov product last year (they are a business trying to earn money, after all), which technically meant it was no longer open source. In order to keep sharing its code with the commun...

AI is the main topic of conversation for this week’s episode. Between continued advancements in the technology and governments trying to put safeguards in place to prevent a Terminator-style future, there’s plenty going on. OpenAI has introduced a new feature of its API called “structured outputs,” which essentially lets developers pass in a valid JSON schema that guarantees the model will always...

This week’s episode kicks off with an announcement that Node 22.6 has experimental TypeScript support!  What you might not realize unless you read the fine print though, is that this isn’t the sort of TS support you might assume. Instead, the feature strips type annotations from .ts files, allowing them to run without transforming TS-specific syntax. Tauri, a competitor to Electron for building cr...

Google is making headline news once again as it reverses course on a decision to block third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. After years of testing, planning, and delays, Google scrapped a plan to turn off third-party cookie tracking by default like Safari and Firefox already do. In other news, the annual CSS Working Group meeting wrapped up recently, and some of the exciting features the gro...

Web development survey results season is upon us, so this week’s episode covers two of the newly released survey results: the State of React survey 2023 and Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024. Just over 13,000 developers filled out the State of React survey, and the results were quite interesting. React devs are fans of component libraries like MUI (Material UI) and shadc/n, state management lib...

Popular web framework Astro is making lots of headlines this week, between new experimental feature Server Islands, and achieving “official deployment partner” status with Netlify, it’s been a whirlwind. But in addition to Astro’s big news, Expo, arguably the most popular framework for building React Native apps, has been endorsed by the React Native team as the recommended way to build apps. Also...