Philosophy
For several years, I (@erikras) actively maintained the first big form library in the React community, Redux Form. During those years, I learned many lessons, about open source and React, and saw hundreds of forms use cases from around the world. As Redux Form grew in popularity (and bundle size), I received a lot of feedback from the community. React Final Form is my answer to the concerns of the community.
Talk
In this talk, I explain the journey through Redux Form to the conception and creation of React Final Form.
Next Generation Forms with React Final Form – React Alicante 2018, Alicante, Spain
Goals
React Final Form strives to meet the following goals:
Strongly Typed
React Final Form provides strong typing via both Flow and Typescript to allow you to catch common bugs at coding time.
Modularity
Just because some forms can be complex doesn't mean that your users should need to download all that code for a simple form! React Final Form and Final Form break out complex functionality into separate packages, so the form state management core doesn't get bloated by complicated use cases. This allows you to build the form library you need for every use case.
Also, this allows for...
Minimal Bundle Size
React Final Form is a minimal wrapper around the zero-dependency Final Form core. All React Final Form does is know how to get form values out of SyntheticEvent and manage field subscriptions to the form.
High Performance
You probably won't need to fine-tune your form performance, but if your form grows and starts to lag, you'll be glad you've chosen React Final Form. Every bit of form and field state can be chosen à la carte to trigger a rerender in React.
If you're familiar with Redux in React, it's a little bit like how you can use selectors to specify exactly which "slice" of state you want your component to be notified about.
The result is that you can streamline your form for maximum performance.
