React Query: Making Data Fetching Declarative

Data fetching is one of the most common tasks in web applications. Whether it’s loading user profiles, product lists, or dashboard statistics, every app needs to communicate with external APIs. In React, this often involves setting up a useEffect hook, managing multiple state variables like loading, error, and data, and ensuring everything updates correctly after each render.

This approach works fine for small applications, but as the codebase grows, the same pattern starts repeating everywhere. Each component ends up defining its own fetch logic, tracking loading states, and handling errors independently. The result is repetitive and hard to maintain — a tangle of effects and states that distracts from the core UI logic.

React Query provides a cleaner, more declarative alternative. Instead of writing complex side-effect logic ourselves, we simply declare what data our component needs, and React Query automatically handles fetching, caching, retries, and synchronization in the background. Our components stay focused on what they do best — displaying data — while React Query takes care of keeping that data accurate and up to ...