React Query is a library that provides hooks to query and update data from your React application.

It shines with the way it handles a local cache to provide a sweet user experience.

When requesting multiples time the same data, the library is able to retrieve the previous result of the query from its cache, while re-fetching fresh data in the background. As a result the user does not have to wait for the fresh data, staring at a loading indicator.

This concept of “State While Revalidate” is also used by the library SWR but React Query provides a lot of extra features like pagination and pre-fetching. The killer feature may be a specific debugging tool that lets you visualize the content of the local cache, for each request that was made, with the different statuses (“fresh”, “fetching”, “stale”…).

The author Tanner Linsley has two other interesting projects on Best of JavaScript:

• React Table
• React Virtual