Announcement: Library's future

[kettanaito]

With the respect to those who use and contribute to this library I feel I need to share the future vision of react-advanced-form, and make it clear what is the development status now.

What happens now

Although there are minor issues, I treat the current state of the library (1.6.7) as stable. It's actively used in production, and it's safe to introduce it to your project.

However, I want to announce that all the current feature development is stopped. Bugfixes should be introduced occasionally, but, unfortunately, I have no time to investigate and solve each bug due to work/life schedule. If you discover and issue, please feel free to investigate and solve it, I will support you with suggestions and review your pull request.

What happens in the future?

This doesn't mean that the library is stale. On the contrary, I will try to dedicate time to introduce the next major version of the library, hopefully, somewhere this year. It will be re-written in TypeScript, and contain a lot of architectural improvements.

This project hasn't been written in the most proper way due to time constrains, and some decisions taken at the very beginning still backfire (#268, #287) after a year of its existence. I don't believe solving them is possible with the current state of the architecture, thus I'm putting my effort in re-writing this library from scratch, utilizing proper event sourcing, and making its architecture resilient toward future adjustments or features.

I plan to release the first beta of 2.0 approximately in the autumn of 2019. It will be a breaking change, it will introduce new API (#264), and it will eradicate a ton of existing issues caused by architectural problems.

What does it mean for developers?

If you are using RAF you may not get new features this year. Bugs will be solved depending on their priority, and I would be thankful for bug reporters to attempt to solve bugs as well. It's an open source project, so you are welcome to contribute and fix things. There is no pressure on you, and no pressure on the current contributors, we all do it in the free time.

What does it mean for contributors?

Please try to help others with questions or issues, if you have time. I am extremely thankful for people who support this project!

Afterword

I'm thankful for your understanding and will try to support your questions as much as I can. The project is not going anywhere, I'm just taking a step back to rethink it, and make a better version of it.

[kettanaito]

I wanted to bump this to let anybody interested know that the plans regarding improving the library has been in discussion since the last year. I don't have much time to dedicate to it at the moment, but there is a solid foundation developed that would eventually become react-advanced-form@2.0. I treat the absence of issues during this period as a sign that the latest release is stable and can be safely relied on.

Thank you for using this library.

[maxrdu]

Any news regarding typescript support?

[kettanaito]

Hey, @MushroomMaula. There are no plans to provide a TypeScript support to the current version. We welcome external type definitions by contributors (i.e. as a PR to DefinitelyTyped repo).

The next version of RAF is rewritten entirely in TypeScript. I don't have any dates when the next version lands, as it's not on my schedule. There may be time to work on it somewhen closer to the end of the year. I wouldn't expect that release sooner than next year due to resources limitation.