Ionic React RC is now out!

2 min read

Earlier this year, the Ionic team released the beta version of Ionic React. After receiving the developer feedback and contributions from the community, the team launched Ionic React RC on Wednesday.

The team says that this first major release of Ionic React was made possible by Ionic 4.0. Previously, Ionic was built using Angular components, but Ionic 4.0 was rewritten to use Web Components. This change made the Ionic Framework, an app development framework that can be used alongside any front end frameworks, not just Angular.

Why is Ionic React needed

Explaining the motivation behind Ionic React, Ely Lucas, Software Engineer & Dev Advocate at Ionic wrote in the announcement, “Ionic React RC marks the first major release of our vision to bring Ionic development to more developers on other frameworks.”

Though it is possible to import the core Ionic components directly into React projects, this method does not provide a good developer experience. Also, when working with web components in React, you need to write some boilerplate code to properly communicate with the web components.

Ionic React will essentially work as a “thin wrapper” around the core components of Ionic and will export them as native React components. It will also handle the boilerplate code for you. However, you still need to write a few features in the native framework such as page lifetime management and lifecycle methods. You can do this by extending the react-router package with @ionic/react-router.

Considering this is a release candidate, the team is not expecting many major changes. Sharing the team’s next steps, Lucas said, “We will be looking closely at any issues that pop up during the RC phase and working on some final code stabilization and minor bug fixes…We also plan on creating some more content and guides in the docs to help with some best practices we’ve found when working with Ionic React.”

The team is now seeking developer feedback before they come up with the final release. If you encounter any issues, you can report it on the GitHub repo and tag the issue with “package react”.

To know further updates on Ionic React, you can also have a chat with the team who will be present at React Rally from August 22-23 at Salt Lake City, UT. This is a community conference that brings together developers of all backgrounds using React.js, React Native, and related tools.

Many developers are excited about this update. Here’s what a few Twitter users are saying:

Check out the official announcement by the Ionic team to know more in detail.