Starbeam: Universal Reactivity and What It Means For You

Room Qu4b

Tuesday, April 11th 2023
11:30 AM—12:30 PM EST

Reactivity is a hot topic in the frontend world, and the past five years have seen an explosion of innovation on topic. Unfortunately, every framework has its own reactivity API, and these APIs are not compatible with one another.

Enter Starbeam.

Starbeam is a state-of-the-art reactivity library that lets you build universal reactive code that works with your favorite framework. Starbeam lets you write universal code working with reactive data, of course, but it’s not just a lowest-common-denominator system.

Starbeam lets you write reactive objects that:

• respond to component lifecycle (“resources”)
• respond to the lifecycle of a specific DOM node (“element modifiers”)
• are attached to the lifecycle of an application (“services”)

If you’re familiar with React, you can think of Starbeam as a library for writing universal hooks. Starbeam “renderers” take universal reactive objects written using Starbeam and render them in your framework of choice. And each official Starbeam renderer is carefully built to feel idiomatic for its framework, and to take advantage of advanced framework features where appropriate.

In this talk, Yehuda will demonstrate how to write universal reactive objects using Starbeam, and then show how you can use those objects in multiple frameworks.

You will come away with an understanding of Starbeam’s design and enough context to get started with Starbeam in your app or library.