Web development
fromInfoWorld
18 hours agoHTMX 4.0: Hypermedia finds a new gear
HTMX 4.0 replaces XHR with the Fetch API, enhancing performance and developer experience in web development.
React Native v0.85 introduces a new Shared Animation backend, enhancing the animation capabilities of applications. Upcoming features like <ViewTransition> and Skia Graphite promise to further improve user experiences.
One of the most significant changes is the move to integrate CSS module support directly into webpack's core. Currently available behind the experimental.css option, this feature eliminates the need for mini-css-extract-plugin. The team expects to complete integration into core around early 2026, with the feature remaining experimental until webpack 6, at which point plugin-based CSS handling will no longer be necessary.
Events are essential inputs to modern front-end systems. But when we mistake reactions for architecture, complexity quietly multiplies. Over time, many front-end architectures have come to resemble chains of reactions rather than models of structure. The result is systems that are expressive, but increasingly difficult to reason about.
Modern web applications are no longer just "sites." They are long-lived, highly interactive systems that span multiple runtimes, global content delivery networks, edge caches, background workers, and increasingly complex data pipelines. They are expected to load instantly, remain responsive under poor network conditions, and degrade gracefully when something goes wrong.
Frontends are no longer written only for humans. AI tools now actively work inside our codebases. They generate components, suggest refactors, and extend functionality through agents embedded in IDEs like Cursor and Antigravity. These tools aren't just assistants. They participate in development, and they amplify whatever your architecture already gets right or wrong. When boundaries are unclear, AI introduces inconsistencies that compound over time, turning small flaws into brittle systems with real maintenance costs.
Over the past decade, software development has undergone a massive transformation due to continuous innovations in tools, processors and novel architectures. In the past, most applications were monoliths and then shifted to microservices, and now we find ourselves embracing composability - a paradigm that prioritizes modular, reusable, and flexible software design. Instead of writing separate, tightly coupled applications, developers now compose software using reusable business capabilities that can be plugged into multiple projects. This enables greater scalability, maintainability, and collaboration across teams and organizations. At the heart of this movement is Bit Harmony, a framework designed to make composability a first-class citizen in modern web development.
We've identified, responsibly disclosed, and confirmed 2 critical, 2 high, 2 medium, 1 low security vulnerabilities. Vibe-Hacking Cloudflare's Vibe-Coded Next.js Replacement demonstrates that AI-generated code passing functional tests can still miss security hardening, and automated AI tooling can help find those vulnerabilities.
When applications grow, state becomes messy, components break, and small changes ripple into unexpected bugs. This is where many learners realize that knowing React syntax is not the same as knowing how React applications are built.
Waku, a minimal React framework has released version 1.0 alpha, marking its public API surface area as stable as the project shifts focus towards bug fixes and compatibility improvements. Waku 1.0 alpha represents a significant milestone for the lightweight framework, which has been in development for nearly three years. The release stabilises the framework's public APIs and signals a transition from feature development to refinement and stability.
Vercel, the cloud platform behind Next.js, has released react-best-practices, an open-source repository containing over 40 performance optimization rules for React and Next.js applications. The framework, which encapsulates over a decade of engineering knowledge from Vercel's production codebases, is structured specifically for consumption by AI coding agents and LLMs, though the team notes it is equally valuable for human developers.
The web is full of AI assistants that appear to understand application UIs, user data, and intent. In practice, however, most of these systems operate outside the application itself. When you try to build one from scratch, you quickly run into a core limitation: large language models have no native understanding of your React state, component hierarchy, or business logic.
Hi everyone! This week, we saw a lot of activity on X about the new AI skills system. Personally, what excited me most is the new Firefox release that unlocks interesting things for React developers. The React Native ecosystem is also super active, with many interesting releases. And I'm sure Expo 55 beta will drop just after we send our email 😅, so make sure to check their blog because it's coming soon. Don't miss the next email! As always, thanks for supporting us on your favorite platform: