An interactive guide to component composition with React Server Components

Evaluating Next.js's implementation of React's new server features.

In the dying embers of 2023, Mayank wrote a post that went through the trials and tribulations of React Server Components. I read the article, eyes widening all the way through to the end until my face vaguely resembled a US electrical socket, and it ultimately left me feeling like, man, I’m glad I’m not doing React at the moment.

This year, the React team unveiled something they've been quietly researching for years: an official way to run React components exclusively on the server. This is a significant paradigm shift, and it's caused a whole lot of confusion in the React community. In this tutorial, we'll explore this new world, and build an intuition for how it works, and how we can take advantage of it.