My opinion on Angular 18 & React 19

So Angular 18 was released and for React the version 19 release candidate was announced at ReactConf and it's definitely interesting to have these big new major releases for two of the biggest web development frameworks front-end web development frameworks one should probably say side by side so close to each other because that of course has not always been the case. Angular essentially releases a new major version every six months and React has no fixed schedule. Indeed React 18 which was the last major version before React 19 was released in 2022 so over two years ago now but now we have these two big new versions even though React 19 isn't stable yet but soon and the question is what does this mean for us and the answers can already be found in many articles and videos the short summary is that both versions don't change everything don't force you to rewrite your code or anything like that even though you could think that they do if you read some comments but hey it's the internet so of course it is like that but in the end if we maybe start with Angular 18 I have to be careful to not mix up these version numbers Angular 18 brings some much needed stability I would say whilst still continuing its innovation path if you want to call it like this Angular 18 now marks the new control flow syntax as stable the deferrable views as stable but at the same time new signals related APIs were added though technically those were already added with Angular 17 minor versions of Angular 17 I guess but there aren't these big groundbreaking changes now with Angular 18 instead they're just taking more small steps into the right direction whilst and that's also important of course also supporting the old Angular you don't have to use signals you don't have to use these new features if you don't want to that's super important obviously also to them because the Angular framework landscape also is a bit fragmented not all projects use the latest version indeed there are projects that still use rather old versions so that's that but Angular 18 therefore is another new major version which adds some new features but which brings some much needed stability at least in my opinion which is also why I took it as an opportunity to release a big course update with more to come now react 19 is kind of similar and then it's not I guess it's complicated because react 19 in most projects doesn't add too much new stuff not too many new features there isn't something groundbreaking new like react hooks instead there are small quality of life improvements I'd say like the fact that you can provide context with the context object itself now instead of that nested provider or component or the fact that you can finally use refs on your own components without using forward ref you can simply accept them as regular props and use them as such that's great that's actually a big useful change but it's not a big change regarding the code you write it's just making your code a bit easier and using forward ref and that old approach also still works so nothing too fancy there a bit more interesting maybe form actions a new way of handling form submissions that's now offered by react basically now it has a built-in way of handling form submissions that's interesting and definitely something to to take a look at once it's out but also nothing you have to use the the most interesting parts I guess are react server components server actions and the new use hook and the funny thing regarding these features is that in most react projects I guess you can't use them you can't use them in vit based projects at least react server components and server actions can't be used there unless you make sure that you edit and adjust your project such that these features are supported which is not necessarily trivial because these are features which as their name kind of implies server components server actions which require a server or which at least don't run on the client side they need to run somewhere else on a server or at build time and therefore you need a project setup that provides such an environment also in production and that splits the code appropriately so that server side code doesn't end up in the client side bundle and vice versa but most of all it's important that the server code doesn't go to the client side and therefore these features are part of react 19 they're stable though they'll still keep on working on it but they are there now but you can't just use them instead you need projects that support these features and at the moment that mostly still means next.js it won't stay that way and of course you could set up your own projects there are other projects out there as well other frameworks remix will eventually support react server components though it's not really called remix anymore but I'll create a separate video on that but at the moment it mostly is next.js at least that's the biggest framework that supports these features and that has supported them already over the last year because next.js used that experimental react version under the hood now it can use the react 19 version since now these features are built in there so that's nice but it doesn't change too much for you as a developer and the use hook is also kind of tricky because you can use it to read context that's great but you can also use it on promises but not on promises created by you in your component but instead on promises that are either created in a server component and passed to the client component or on promises that come from libraries that integrate with react suspense so I guess you get my point it's non-trivial now that's not necessarily bad I'd say because the the upside of course is that react does give us a lot of features which we can use implicitly I guess through libraries and through frameworks that make building more complex projects and full stack applications easier because the idea behind react server components and server actions is pretty intriguing at least to me and working with next.js besides all the things that are not great about it I'd say is indeed pretty nice building full stack apps with react and next.js is definitely something I want to do and therefore both releases react 19 and angular 18 are in my opinion huge steps in the right direction and they do offer new feature or in angular's case offer smaller new features and stabilize important new features but they do that without changing the way you write your code and in react's case it offers new features which you might not be able to use but if you are able to use them then they can be really useful and therefore it's definitely an interesting development quite different from what was the standard a couple of years ago I'd say. I remember when react hooks were introduced with 16.8 I think that really changed the way we write react code and you could use it in every react project and that's now not like this in the react world. In the angular world on the other hand we're taking a short break now before we'll probably see more new features but we already got a lot of new features over the last couple of months and years there so that angular today is quite different from what it was two years ago and therefore definitely interesting times to live in two big frameworks with two pretty interesting releases that do offer interesting new features that can definitely become very useful in future projects but obviously that's just my take on it and I also don't know what will happen in the future so what do you think? What do you think about react 19, angular 18? You might not care at all, definitely let me know, but definitely even more so let me know if you do care and let me know what you think about these releases.

Channel: Maximilian Schwarzmüller

Views: 50,399

Keywords: maximilian schwarzmueller, maximilian schwarzmüller, podcast, maximilian schwarzmuller, coding, programming, web development, developer, angular, angularjs, react, react.js, reactjs, angular 18, react 19

Id: w7oljgTfIzM

Length: 9min 46sec (586 seconds)

Published: Sun May 26 2024