Talk Proposal: Frontend Application Bundles, the Docker of Frontend #12
Description
Frontend apps are on the cusp of a revolution—React is about to launch a streaming server renderer that massively improves performance on both low-end and high-end devices. It's a new dawn for performance & accessibility, but raises another question? How should we host the server component? Can we do that without vendor lock-in?
Enter FABs (Frontend Application Bundles), a portable, compact, immutable, server-side JS format that lets you deploy anything from static sites or Next.js to full custom server-rendered React apps anywhere that can run JS, like Cloudflare Workers, Lambda@Edge, Now, etc. Finally, we can have a toolchain that supports the full breadth of frontend projects & server environments, without locking everything to a single host.
My talk aims to draw parallels between the server world of a decade ago & the frontend world of today. In the past, companies like AWS & Heroku were innovating & offering exciting new products, but users had to make a choice of which one to use and lock-in their development to target that platform. Today, it's exciting offerings from platforms like Now and Netlify, but all their innovation is locked down inside their ecosystem.
Docker changed that in a profound way, and FABs are poised to do the same thing. So this talk is a prediction of the future—that with React's new streaming renderer, a lot more companies will be looking to add a server-side component, and a standard, interoperable bundle format like FABs makes that much more accessible.
The project is still in its early stages, and this talk will be a draft of the proper FAB "launch" at React Rally later this year, but I'd love the chance to put this new idea out there and get feedback from a new audience!