Placing Radium Into Maintenance Mode

It has been more than four years since @vjeux proposed a revolutionary new idea for styling React components using JavaScript APIs. This CSS-in-JS talk sparked a wave of innovation in the React open source community as we experimented with new ways to apply styles to our React components. Radium was one of the early tools to provide APIs for interop between JavaScript and DOM style tags, and allowed React developers to avoid specificity conflicts by scoping styles to DOM elements.

Over time this experimental idea turned into a valuable tool used across the community and has received 6,900+ stars with ~80 contributors, along with a community response of additional plugins, grid-frameworks, and tooling. Since Radium's initial release there has been tremendous growth in the css-in-js open-source world, with new tools like styled-components, emotion, and styled-jsx just to name a few.

Today we are announcing that active development will be formally discontinued on Radium, as we move the project into 'Maintenance Mode'.

What does stable maintenance mean?

Stable maintenance means we're not planning on modernizing Radium or adding any new features. Radium will still receive regular bug fixes and security updates, but the pace of updates will slow. You can read more about stable maintenance and our other maintenance levels here: https://formidable.com/blog/2019/oss-maintenance/

Motivations for discontinuing active development

Believe it or not, the initial React target of Radium was version 0.12.0, and very-little prior art had existed showcasing strategies for managing inline styles using JavaScript. The world has changed since then, and today the space offers many wonderful alternatives to managing styles in JS, some even being framework-agnostic.

We believe the best way we can serve the React community is to recommend more flexible alternatives, while supporting users who already depend on our project. In our daily client work we have found better solutions that offer more flexibility and are built to work with the current modern toolchain.

Recommended Tools

• Emotion
• Aphrodite
• Glamor
• JSS
• styled-components
• Linaria