A recap of front-end development in 2017
Front-end engineering once again evolved at a feverish pace in 2017. Here is a list of the most notable events of the past year.
React 16 and the MIT license
React continues to dominate the front-end landscape, and 2017 provided one of the most anticipated releases yet with version 16. It includes the fiber architecture which enables asynchronous UI rendering. This release also makes it much easier to manage unexpected application failures by providing error boundaries along with many other features.
Surprisingly, the most important improvement to React this past year wasn’t the new features, but the change to its open source license. Facebook shed its BSD license that was causing companies to move away from React and adopted the user-friendly MIT license. In addition, Jest, Flow, Immutable.js, and GraphQL gained the MIT license as well.
Core team and top contributors include Dominic Gannaway, Dan Abramov, Sophie Alpert, Sebastian Markbåge, Paul O’Shannessy, Andrew Clark, Cheng Lou, Clement Hoang, Probably Flarnie…
