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You should know this before choosing Next.js

eduardoboucas.com

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Re: You should know this before choosing Next.js

#32
post #2

I warn everyone away from next.js. Unsurprisingly V0 has a real shot at massively increasing its adoption because people don’t know any better. What are some salient counter points for choosing next.js? I see a lot of new devs not want to have to think about deployment and management of systems so that is one aspect. If you only know react I guess getting SSR without having to learn something else is a win at the cos…

There is such an exaggeration about the need/utility of SSR. Google is dead for new projects, if one is optimizing their stack based on the easiness for Google to crawl it, I think they are making a terrible architectural decision for no return. Deploying a React/JavaScript app is much easier without Next.JS.

I agree but clearly Vercel benefits from teams choosing SSR, so teams need to take it with a grain of salt.

Re: You should know this before choosing Next.js

#33
post #6

I was under the impression that Next.js was the successor to React? Is that not the case?

I could totally see how you'd arrive there. Backstory:

create-react was a starter boilerplate for React built and maintained by Facebook. This was when webpack was the standard and just getting a local development environment to "hello world" for React could be challenging.[1]

That project was depreciated and the popularity of the Next.js site framework for react projects (plus I certainly assume heavy lobbying from Vercel) pushed the react docs to officially suggest create-next as the new starting point.[2]

Note that there are many other ways to start a react project and there are also many react projects that don't use or need Nextjs. (I use react quite a bit but I pair it with Astro.js, for example.)

I would say that a lightweight Vite template is really all you need for a lot of early success with a local environment for learning / building with React.

[1] https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app [2] https://react.dev/learn/creating-a-react-app

Re: You should know this before choosing Next.js

#36
post #6

I was under the impression that Next.js was the successor to React? Is that not the case?

You're not entirely wrong. React is maintained by Meta and Vercel. There is also a divide in React at the moment, like Python 2 and 3, between server first and client first. Next.js is the "official" way to do server first React.

Re: You should know this before choosing Next.js

#37
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> next.js when they switched from the pages router to app router It is react-router all over again. For those who weren't around, react-router appeared early in React's life, and lots of people were using it. But, for every major version they released, they completely changed the way of doing the routes/routing, so if you wanted to use a maintained release, you'd have to constantly refactor, often without any real ga…

>It's kind of weird to me how programmers (especially of libraries like that) aren't more careful about introducing breaking changes, since the work needed to be done afterwards multiplies really quickly. Programmers, generally, always aim to do that. But the JS framework world for whatever reason has this constant obsession with reinvention. I honestly think it stems from a sort of inferiority complex that FE devs h…

> Programmers, generally, always aim to do that

Based on the amount of churn almost everywhere, I disagree with it seems like most are trying to aim to do that. I've been hit by similar issues (across multiple versions) in Python, Rust, Ruby, Go and bunch of other languages too. But then I'm comparing other ecosystems to Clojure which actually aims for interface stability, so maybe an unfair comparison.

Re: You should know this before choosing Next.js

#39

> With Next.js having such a sizeable share of the market, I would expect a lot more hosting options, which would foster competition and innovation across the board, ultimately benefitting users and the web. Would it? Or would it turn Next.js hosting into a commodity with zero marginal profit, ulimately making it impossible to fund development?

Yeah, probably the second one.

Re: You should know this before choosing Next.js

#40
post #4

Nice to see someone willing to stick their head above the trench wall. I worked on a "Vercel clone" for a year. After that experience I'd also warn friends to stay clear of Next.js. That said, we don't owe Vercel anything and if they want to ship a framework that's essentially a dongle for their service, they're perfectly entitled to do that.

Yes, they can ship such a dongle, but they have no right to claim to be open source or listening to their userbase then. The problem is the hypocrisy of the company, and therefore loss of trust.
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