The setting: PWA Studio

The year 2018 will be filled with a lot of exciting developments with Magento 2: New API improvements, a new architecture based on CQRS, the introduction of GraphQL as a standard for JSON replies, perhaps a twist to the database abstraction layer (because: what happened to the Entity Manager?). But the most exciting change has everything to do with PWA and its first implementation in Magento through PWA Studio.

Progressive Web Apps and tools to build them

PWA is one of the more popular buzzwords these days. It basically means that a website is able to have more app-like behaviours like offline usage, dashboard tricks, a few visual enhancements but above all, performance. To build a PWA properly, you will need to dive into service workers, modern JavaScript frameworks and a completely new approach of frontend technology.

The aim of Magento is to release a set of tools somewhere in the upcoming months - dubbed Magento PWA Studio - to help developers build PWAs based on ReactJS with Magento behaviour. This will include Node tools, Webpack, suggestions for architecture and obviously, the relevant React tools.

A new learning curve

Unfortunately, a lot of us Magento developers have dived into Magento 2 from the backend point of view and are less familiar with JavaScript as a whole. There is a new learning curve we need to go through. It's an exciting learning curve because JavaScript is hot. But nonetheless, it is a challenge.

This is where Reacticon comes in. It is a Magento developer conference with one main goal: To familiarize Magento coders with the tools used in the upcoming PWA platform - React, Redux, JSX, Webpack, but also smaller more specific libraries (like GraphQL parsers, NPM commands, wrapper scripts, optimization tools).

Together with Magento

Even better: Yireo is organizing this Reacticon event together with Magento. The PWA Studio team is tightly connected to the program that we will put down for you. It is not an official event and our aim is not to make any news come out that might conflict with the Magento roadmap. However, Reacticon is your chance to hop on board early and efficiently. It will be awesome!

Event details

The Reacticon event will take place on Friday, March 16th, 2018, while the day after - Saturday, March 17th, 2018 - a hackathon will take place (again including lead developers from the PWA Studio team to help you work with React). The venue - Blue Collar Hotel - is located on an industrial area called "Strijp S": It is right in the middle of the city of Eindhoven - easily reachable by train or even flights (low budget flights go there).

Ticket sales have now started. And with only 2 months to go, you need to decide quickly: Are you going to React or not?