8/12/2015

Relay Technical Preview | React

Relay Technical Preview

RECENT POSTS
Relay Technical Preview
New React Devtools Beta
React v0.14 Beta 1
Deprecating JSTransform and
react-tools
React Native Release Process
React v0.13.3
GraphQL Introduction
React v0.13.2
React Native v0.4
Community Round-up #26
All posts ...

React

Docs

August 11, 2015 by Joseph Savona

Relay
Today we're excited to share an update on Relay - the technical preview is now open-source
and available on GitHub.

Why Relay
While React simplified the process of developing complex user-interfaces, it left open the
question of how to interact with data on the server. It turns out that this was a significant
source of friction for our developers; fragile coupling between client and server caused datarelated bugs and made iteration harder. Furthermore, developers were forced to constantly
re-implement complex async logic instead of focusing on their apps. Relay addresses these
concerns by borrowing important lessons from React: it provides declarative, componentoriented data fetching for React applications.
Support

Declarative data-fetching means that Relay applications specify what data they need, not
how
to fetch that
data. Just as React uses a description of the desiredGitHub
UI to manage
Download
Blog
Reactview
Native
updates, Relay uses a data description in the form of GraphQL queries. Given these
descriptions, Relay coalesces queries into batches for efficiency, manages error-prone
asynchronous logic, caches data for performance, and automatically updates views as data
changes.
Relay is also component-oriented, extending the notion of a React component to include a
description of what data is necessary to render it. This colocation allows developers to
reason locally about their application and eliminates bugs such under- or over-fetching data.
Relay is in use at Facebook in production apps, and we're using it more and more because
Relay lets developers focus on their products and move fast. It's working for us and we'd like
to share it with the community.

What's Included
We're open-sourcing a technical preview of Relay - the core framework that we use
internally, with some modifications for use outside Facebook. As this is the first release, it's
good to keep in mind that there may be some incomplete or missing features. We'll continue
to develop Relay and are working closely with the GraphQL community to ensure that Relay
tracks updates during GraphQL's RFC period. But we couldn't wait any longer to get this in
your hands, and we're looking forward to your feedback and contributions.
Relay is available on GitHub and npm.

What's Next
The team is super excited to be releasing Relay - and just as excited about what's next. Here
are some of the things we'll be focusing on:
Offline support. This will allow applications to fulfill queries and enqueue updates
without connectivity.
Real-time updates. In collaboration with the GraphQL community, we're working to
define a specification for subscriptions and provide support for them in Relay.
A generic Relay. Just as the power of React was never about the virtual DOM, Relay is
much more than a GraphQL client. We're working to extend Relay to provide a unified
interface for interacting not only with server data, but also in-memory and native device
data (and, even better, a mix of all three).
Finally, it's all too easy as developers to focus on those people with the newest devices
and fastest internet connections. We're working to make it easier to build applications
that are robust in the face of slow or intermittent connectivity.
Thanks!

http://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/08/11/relay-technical-preview.html

1/2

8/12/2015

Relay Technical Preview | React

A Facebook & Instagram collaboration.

Acknowledgements

http://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/08/11/relay-technical-preview.html

20132015 Facebook Inc.

Documentation licensed under CC BY 4.0.

2/2