In the past, I stayed away from building custom widgets in Experience Builder because layer selection had to be done at design time. I was recently informed that widgets can now dynamically work with any layers currently on the map. Since it’s been a while, I need to refresh my React skills—specifically, which React 19 component concepts should I focus on?
Experience Builder now supports dynamic access to layers at runtime, so the old design-time limitation is gone. To refresh your React skills, focus on functional components and hooks (useState, useEffect, useMemo, useCallback, useRef), plus the Context API for shared state and basic async patterns. Experience Builder relies more on state management and lifecycle control than bleeding-edge React features, so hooks and clean component composition will cover most real-world needs.