React on Chain (f.k.a. BOS Web Engine or BWE) is an experimental framework aimed at replacing the NEAR BOS VM with a full-featured React(or Preact) environment which would enable access to the greater web ecosystem including NPM dependencies. It is an R&D effort lead by Pagoda and will be considered for production usage once our GitHub issues tagged as P0 - Release requirement are completed.
Developers who have created components on BOS should expect a reasonable migration effort to make their components compatible with RoC once it launches. See "Will BWE be backwards compatible with existing VM components?" in the FAQ section for more info
Some core goals:
- ability to import npm packages
- component code is minimally different from vanilla React
- isolation of component execution leverages browser sandboxing (iframes)
- configurable trust model to tune performance when embedded components are known to be safe
Examples of other impactful features we plan to research:
- TypeScript support
- Full web API support (canvas, etc)
- Cross-component global state management
For a more detailed breakdown of the work, see issues labeled with Epic
See our docs!
No. RoC is a complete re-write of the component runtime and will not be backwards compatible with existing components due to significant architectural differences. Components will be similar in many ways since they are already written with JSX, but RoC code will look much more like vanilla React with some additional patterns on top.
Our primary goal is to build the most capable engine to support complex dapps for a vibrant ecosystem, then we will make efforts to ease the migration of existing work as much as possible. There will be ample discussion before any decisions are made on when and how to start switching to RoC once it is ready.
While the process to convert an existing React codebase to run on RoC will be significantly easier than the BOS, there will still be some syntax and architecture changes which must be handled manually.
See our full FAQ here