The react-spring roadmap 2022 / 23

I believe this is the first roadmap that react-spring has seriously had documented beside holding RFCs for breaking change versions. Its looking at the next 12-18 months from now till the end of 2023, so the next review of the roadmap will most likely at earliest be Aug/Sept 2023 and will be based off this one, potentially carrying areas that were not tackled but are still areas of interest.

This roadmap is not definitive & can be modified to "remove" items (nothing will be removed, more just striken through) as well as refining particular areas of the roadmap. Some initiatives will be described as "investigation" because without real understanding of the problem, committing to actual feature work is not realistic.

As always, feedback is well received and contributions are more than welcome either through actual work or financial to aid the development of the library – https://opencollective.com/react-spring

Legend

Documentation

• Finish moving / re-writing documentation to the new beta-docs site
• Design & build examples directory for doc site
• ✍️ Add more generic / basic use case examples
  • Slide-in side panel
  • CSS Gradients
  • Simple modal
  • Slide-up drawer (think native styled)
  • Compass (shows full 360o rotation)
• Design & build tutorials directory
• Create 3 tutorials

Performance

• Investigate how we can support sideEffects: false again
• Investigate react-native performance, how does it compare to re-animated?
• Focus further on bundle size, where can we trim the fat?

Features & Fixes

• ✍️ Investigate how we can best support different raf drivers in one environment (e.g. r3f & web vs globals package)
• Animate Presence & Animated layout components
• Timelines, can we support them and how would this look / work?
• Introduce more utility hooks, perhaps as an off-shoot library that includes things like "onHover" etc.
  • useScroll
  • useInView
  • useAnimationFrame
  • useDrag(?)

General

• Look at deprecating the use of react-spring npm library
  • Requires new docs to go live that sets the best practice of scoped packages
• Continue to make onboarding for new developers easier and more attractive
• Explore how to engage with our community further increasing contributions to the project

Ending Notes

The key takeaway for the past year has been that our documentation / examples etc. are all geared towards power users, they can be complicated and hard to follow and not enough of the simple stuff is documented, off putting new devs to try the library, hopefully we can begin to fix this whilst not forgetting about our "power users".

Thanks for reading this and always, if you have any thoughts and/or opinions then please, feel free to share them here as part of healthy discussion!