ReactEurope conference summary!

The beginning

Just like last year Emil, Jocke and Woll went on a trip together, this time the destination was Paris instead of Amsterdam.

The story begins when we leave the plane at Charles de Gaulle and we are meet with a wall of hot air smashing into our vulnerable swedish faces. Sweating like crazy we stumble into the terminal and thank the gods for the A/C that they have there.

After meeting up with Martin from KnowIT Reaktor we hailed a Uber cab, which took far longer to find then a taxi (the airport is huge and french people are generally not that great at speaking english).

We know, we know... getting a Uber in Paris just after the massive attacks [ 1][2] from other taxi drivers on Uber cars maybe wasn't the smartest choice, but hey, you need to live a little right? :)

Finally arriving at the hotel we find that there are no A/C in our hotel apartment but only one half-broken fan. This is going to be a hard 3 night visit.

Conference

It's time for the conference, just in the outskirts of the city center the venue was in the basement of a hotel, nothing fancy but fits the purpose I guess. I imagine Paris to be a hard place to find good venues in.

Some of the takeways from the talks is as follows:

Exploring GraphQL (github)

During the conference they released a technical preview of GraphQL. To quote Facebook:

"GraphQL is a data querying language designed to describe the complex, nested data dependencies of modern applications"

Together with Relay, this is going to be a pretty huge performance boost for React and it's been used in production on Facebook for several years now.

Relay (blogpost)

Relay is a new framework from Facebook that will make it so much more efficient to work with React and data fetching from within a component. It's basically a relay service that will take a request from React and then fetch the data from GraphQL in batches to reduce the overhead data that a component receives. This will be big!

The State of Animation in React (github)

Cheng Lou held a very passionate talk about his library React-Motion (link above) where he tries to solve the problem of having to hard-code easing curves and duration in your animations. The demo he held was really nice and a great inspiration booster. Check out the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tavDv5hXpo

React Router (github)

Michael Jackson (yes that is his name) has been working on React Router for a year now and it really seems to add a lot of features to React when it comes to routing, now you can handle everything within React. It also adds a lot of transitions and scroll position when going back and forth between paths.

The end