React, with its addition of Server Components and Server Actions, is evolving into a full-stack framework. Once the most popular frontend framework, it has now successfully bridged the gap between frontend and backend to reign over both sides of the chasm. By Robin Wieruch.
In recent years, TypeScript has emerged as the industry standard, providing frontend developers with a typed and more robust programming language. Once developers embraced TypeScript, there was no turning back. It’s fascinating how a relatively small change in code can have such a significant impact on both a personal and industry-wide level.
The real breakthrough for me came with Server Components and Server Actions in 2024, which bridged the gap to the server by not only calling it, but by being able to implement and execute code on the other side. Server Components allow us to execute React components on the server, enabling direct access from data sources (e.g. databases) before returning the UI with JSX.
React itself provides only the primitives and specifications for Server Components and Server Actions. Meta frameworks built on top of React can bridge the gap with their bundler which interprets the directives (i.e. ‘use client’ and ‘use server’) between client and server. Good read!
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