React Status Issue 427: April 30, 2025

#427 — April 30, 2025

Together with

The Mega April React Labs Update — Every once in a while, the React team drops a ‘Labs’ post where they bring us up to speed with some major new features and what the team is working on. Here, we learn about two new features ready to try out today in react@experimental: View Transitions and the <Activity> component. There are several other features in development too.

Ricky Hanlon

💡 For more on these features, dev YouTuber Theo Browne ▶️ dropped a 40-minute video walking through the entire post and its implications. Meanwhile, Jack Whiting shared a practical example of getting view transitions working in a Next.js app.

New Course: Next.js Fundamentals, v4 — Master Next.js with Scott Moss. Learn React Server Components, Server Actions, dynamic routing, authentication, caching, and edge functions. Create a modern React app, deploy it to Vercel, and level up your skills.

Frontend Masters sponsor

What Does 'use client' Do? — Dan continues his recent stream of insightful posts with a shorter, more practical look at how to think about the use client and use server directives React Server Components introduced and how they let you elegantly structure a client/server app as “a single program spanning two environments” – a concept that Dan thinks could easily outlive React and be useful elsewhere too.

Dan Abramov

IN BRIEF:

🕹️ The React Jam game dev event is back for its sixth run next month, giving you the chance to build a React-powered game in ten days with the potential for getting some exposure/players and possibly even a prize..
bhvr is an interesting new attempt at creating a React-based stack for fullstack apps using Hono and Vite.
🤖 If you're using Cursor for a little AI-driven development, Matt Abrams has some tips for tweaking its settings for a better experience when working on React and Next.js apps.

📺 Make Great React Components with These Tips – “I go over everything I know about building components for the last 8 years.” Alem Tuzlak

📄 When You Might Need to Override the Defaults in TanStack Query Kolade Afode

📄 Selecting From Multiple Models (LLMs) with AI SDK in React Robin Wieruch

📄 You Can 'Serialize' a Promise in React Ryan Toronto

🛠 Code, Tools & Libraries

Storybook 9 Beta — A strong step forward for the popular UI ‘frontend workshop’ with numerous experimental features from Storybook 8 becoming stable. v9 has a strong focus on component testing with interaction, visual, and accessibility testing out of the box. React Native support is another big win.

Michael Shilman

🤖 react-native-ai: On-Device LLM Execution in React Native — Provides first-class compatibility with the Vercel AI SDK, allowing you to use familiar functions like streamText and generateText but with locally run models.

Szymon Rybczak / Callstack

What Engineers Get Wrong About Communication — Learn and avoid mistakes like forgetting about your users and hoarding information.

PostHog sponsor

Reactylon: A React Framework for XR — A framework that builds upon Microsoft’s Babylon.js 3D engine and React to offer a way to create immersive extended reality experiences on the Web. Write 3D scenes in JSX and Reactylon makes them a (virtual) reality – the docs include numerous live demos with code. GitHub repo.

Simone De Vittorio

Yet Another React Lightbox — Works with React 16.8+, 17 and 18, supports numerous input methods, preloads images, supports video slides, zooming, and a high level of customization and there’s an online playground so you can see how it (sc)rolls. GitHub repo.

Igor Danchenko

React Modal Sheet 4.0 – Flexible bottom sheet component built with Framer Motion for smooth transitions.
Gridstack.js 12.1 – Build responsive interactive dashboards quickly.
🌐 next-intl 4.1 – Internationalization (i18n) for Next.js.
📊 Chartbrew 4.0 – Create live reporting dashboards.
MUI X 8.1 – Popular React component suite.
Ink 5.2.1 – Use React to build CLI apps.

📢 Elsewhere in JavaScript

A roundup of some other interesting stories in the broader JavaScript landscape, in case you've missed them:

The V8 team shares some news about a new V8 feature, already usable in Chrome 136, called Explicit Compile Hints that provides a way to control which JS files and functions are eagerly compiled.
SolidJS creator Ryan Carniato reflects on a decade running the SolidJS project, four years after hitting v1.0.
JS runtime Bun has a llms-full.txt file of plain text documentation that can be fed into LLMs to help you work with Bun using AI agents, etc.
You can now use JSR packages with pnpm and Yarn.
Electron 36 and pnpm 10.10 have been released.
⏰ Node.js v18 reached its 'End-Of-Life' today and v24 is due to land very soon as the new 'Current' release. Subscribe to Node Weekly to keep up with all things Node.