Facebook and Google released Yarn yesterday—a new package manager that uses npm's registry but promises faster, more reliable, more secure installations. The collaboration between tech giants and focus on npm's pain points suggests npm has serious problems.
Whether Yarn succeeds depends on execution and whether developers tolerate another package manager.
Facebook released GraphQL to open source this week. It's their internal data query language, used in production for years, now available for everyone. The pitch: instead of REST endpoints with fixed responses, clients query for exactly what they need.
This is radically different from REST, and if it catches on, it changes how we think about APIs entirely.
React showed up last May at JSConf, and the initial reaction was skepticism. Facebook's pitch—"we're putting HTML in JavaScript"—sounded like a regression to the bad old days of mixing presentation and logic. But after spending time with it, I think React is asking the right questions, even if the answers feel uncomfortable.