I agree with this weird mismatch of overcomplexity for the problem it's trying to solve. I did really like though the Gatsby model of ingesting all your source data into GraphQL and then having a standardised way to query and build pages from this. I wish Next.js would learn something from this. I was using Next.js to build a staticly-generated website (so within the remit of Gatsby) but eventually i outgrew the limi…
That feels like the React community in a nutshell.
Seems like any developer who isn't able to think critically about the decisions they make.
Serverless web apps. Using their own Next.js as an example: everything in /pages/ is client app, everything in /api/ is serverless app. Client talks to the /api/ endpoints, /api/ endpoints talk to your domain services. Vercel also provide edge-location hosting and caching.
To be more precise: Vercel is the company (fka "Zeit"). They have a suite of complementary software products and services, including NextJS (a "batteries included" React framework with robust support for SSR and SSG), Now (hosting / CDN / runtime in "serverless" paradigm), Micro, etc. World-class DX and remarkably powerful tools that somehow combine simplicity and flexibility. No affiliation, just a longtime grateful…
Vercel is the company and the product. Now is the old name of the product. It's been thoroughly re-branded. If you go to now.sh it redirects to a page on vercel.com with no mention of "now". The command-line tool is "vercel", aliased to "vc", and it is configured in vercel.json (no longer now.json). If you go to GitHub and look at the repos containing with "now" in their name, they're archived or deprecated.
Oh god. Even companies raising $40,000,000 can’t explain what they do: “Vercel combines the best developer experience with an obsessive focus on end-user performance. Our platform enables frontend teams to do their best work.” Nice, inspiring evocative words, but I care to find what the fuck Vercel IS, and this is not an answer. Maybe if I reword the above it will become clear: Vercel lets developers have a really gr…
They want enterprise customers, not single developers. So they use the usual bullshit marketing wordings. Their only goal is to get someone high level in a big company feeling the sentence is cool so that he lets his email in the "get demo" page. This is just normal enterprise sales, and this is probably why they managed to raise so much compared to most similar services. They really have a strong business focus and…
For an Enterprise customer there is not a lot information that helps to make a proper decision whether it's worth considering, regarding regulation, risk and compliance. I wish you didn't had to go through the whole sales game to find these kind of information out.
Personally, I am quite interested in Remix (see: https://remix.run) which seems to be more flexible and does support not using Javascript in the final output but still leverage the convenience of React (personal opinion).
Maybe Next.js would move a bit towards this approach too
The one thing I dislike about Vercel is that you need to go all in or nothing with it. Say you have a micro-frontend strategy and would like part of your front-end in next.js; you can't.
Overall I really am impressed with Vercel, though. It's been a fun project/company to work with.
I agree with this weird mismatch of overcomplexity for the problem it's trying to solve. I did really like though the Gatsby model of ingesting all your source data into GraphQL and then having a standardised way to query and build pages from this. I wish Next.js would learn something from this. I was using Next.js to build a staticly-generated website (so within the remit of Gatsby) but eventually i outgrew the limi…
I think for any commercial site, it's likely cheaper to use a platform like next or nuxt and a CDN rather than choking your build pipeline with static generation. You still get static performance and just offload it to an edge network and CDN costs are racing downwards.
No need to do static generation at build time or fully server-side rendering with Next.js either, you can build static pages at runtime with ISR
It wasn't a "transition". They straight up killed features that would never work on 2, that worked on 1. For example, websockets. Turns out you can't do those in their ephemeral lambda model.
There are a variety of solutions for realtime w/ serverless: https://vercel.com/docs/solutions/realtime
It is always the same, you want database use a third party, you want websockets use a third party, this approach turns out to be very expensive if you are starting
It wasn't a "transition". They straight up killed features that would never work on 2, that worked on 1. For example, websockets. Turns out you can't do those in their ephemeral lambda model.
There are a variety of solutions for realtime w/ serverless: https://vercel.com/docs/solutions/realtime
It is the same for authentication, file uploads, emails, crons, it is a burden to handle all that externally
No offense, I think people are crazy to rely on a stack they can easily make themselves vs. a series B startup. It's not that difficult to build and deploy full stack apps on your own server.
how many times do we need to link to the dropbox comment before HN commenters get it? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
I Don't care. There are tons of examples of building shit on stacks that won't be around. How about investing a shit ton of time into Azure Kubernetes using Docker containers to find out they dropped support, just like this startup can drop out and never be heard of again. Good luck with that.
Had to use Zeit/Vercel a few months for a “serious” project that requires SSR, caching and multiple staging environments. As the project progresses I noticed an increasing pain from constantly fighting with outdated documentations and limited configurability. I hope that’s changed now though, because there were some parts of Zeit that we loved. For simpler static sites, it’s hard to beat Netlify.
the docs could definitely use some work. there's a ton of nuance in advanced nextjs apps and the docs usually have the answer i am looking for, but it's tough to find it