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Next.js is infuriating

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Re: Next.js is infuriating

#201

Post by chrisweekly »

komali2 wrote: post #85
platelminto wrote: post #71

I was about to start a new project with Next.js... is anyone willing to give me some advice? I'm about to start building an e-commerce site (30-50k poster print designs, i.e. no inventory), and was leaning towards a Django backend (because I know it) and... some sort of SSR frontend. I'm not really a frontend guy, but taking this as an opportunity to learn it. This article obviously does not inspire confidence in me…

In my opinion (9 years FE exp) you should build your ecommerce site in shopify or wordpress + woocommerce or some other off the shelf tool. It will be up before the evening's out and you won't be spending that much extra than you would have anyway, and everything will Just Work (tm) and look pretty good (chuck out 50$ for a nice wordpress theme and you're golden). If you insist on rolling your own, Django + templates…

No! PHP is merely bad, but Wordpress is truly abysmal. Steer clear. Webdev since 1998 (27y).

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#202

Post by jermaustin1 »

Etheryte wrote: post #173
christophilus wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second worst for me. I’ve used Sharepoint.

What do you mean you don't want to step through scripts with a debugger just to understand how to use the official APIs? I'm sure it's better these days, but Sharepoint was one of the platforms I worked with when I was younger and it still gives me bad flashbacks whenever it comes up.

I remember a few early projects that revolved around SP, but one that stands out as "special" was using the SOAP APIs to update a WordPress site. It was a special hell, every hour it would fetch any updates, and push them to the specific WP content-type (iirc - content-types might not have existed yet - this was 2008).

The reason for this, IT had contracted for a content management system from a Microsoft shop, because the CIO was a former Accenture/Avanade consultant. But the brochure-ware website had already been contracted to some random NYC-based web firm, but the CIO didn't want multiple usernames/passwords, so after the WordPress site hand been build, they hired the SharePoint consultants to build out the CMS that the employees would use, but it still didn't hook up to wordpress, so then it became another contractor's job (me) to join the two.

I had worked on Word Press, I even had a few decently popular plugins, but I had never seen the absolute hellscape that was SharePoint before. I wrote a codegen tool that would read the WSDL and create a library with all the classes and calls needed to use it without any SharePoint experience, and wrote some simple ETLs for the handful of "buckets". It was a 2-3 month long journey, but those libraries and my code are still in place today, where they still use wordpress for front-end, and sharepoint as backend (or at least did in 2022 still, the last I talked to anyone still working there).

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#203

Post by martinald »

DanielHB wrote: post #27

When I first saw Next.js I was immediatelly reminded of Meteor.js. I did invest a bit in learning into it and did some personal projects. But quickly realized it was both over-abstracted and inflexible which made it really hard to get it past prototypes. But these solutions keep coming up because they bring one thing: Self-contained / "batteries included". Just the other day there was a thread in hackernews about Lar…

Thing is I'm spoilt by asp.net, which has so much bad 'stigma' in the (esp startup) dev community but it is _extremely_ well designed.

You get a very batteries included approach(es) but you can always punch out of it and override it. I've never got into a situation where I'm feeling like I'm fighting the framework.

I also really like both Blazor Server and Blazor Webasm which allows you to write the frontend in C# too. Blazor server is great for internal admin panel style apps, and blazor webasm is good for saas apps, and for everything else plain old server sider rendering works great.

I'd really recommend anyone who is annoyed with their web framework to give it a go. It's extremely cross platform now (the huge drawback until about a decade ago was it was very hard to run on Linux, which isn't the case at all now - in fact, it's the opposite, harder to run on Windows), very fast and very easy to use. It takes a while to figure out the mental model of the design in your head but once it comes together you can quickly figure out how to override everything when you hit limitations (which tbh, is pretty rare compared to every other framework).

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#204

Post by kremi »

kremi wrote: post #190

I think “middleware” is a bit of a misnomer in Next.js. It’s really an edge function that runs before your request hits the app -- quick header checks, routing, and other lightweight guards. It runs on the edge runtime, not on the app server. The post's author seems to conflate the edge runtime with the server runtime. They’re separate environments with different constraints and trade-offs. I struggled with Next.js a…

To people who downvote my comment (and there are many): please elaborate.

I like to learn and improve. A lot of comments here are just baseless negative comments. Please let’s have a real discussion.

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#205

Post by robertjpayne »

coxmi wrote: post #55

Deno Fresh seems like it has the right approach. It’s not complicated, the docs are refreshingly simple, and it handles both server and client logic without getting confused. It’s just a shame it’s Deno-only (although I completely understand why)

I feel like Fresh being Deno only isn't the primary issue. It's based on Preact which is really just a non-starter for so many because it isolates away too much of the react ecosystem instantly.

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#206

Post by rhubarbtree »

christophilus wrote: post #83
YuukiRey wrote: post #79

I 100% agree. I've ran into the same issues, and I would never use Next.js for anything, and I will encourage every team at work to use something else. In general Next.js has so many layers of abstraction that 99.9999% of projects don't need. And the ones that do are probably better off building a bespoke solution from lower level parts. Next.js is easily the worst technology I've ever used.

Second worst for me. I’ve used Sharepoint.

No one will understand until they’ve seen it with their own eyes.

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#207

Post by throwaway127482 »

berkes wrote: post #107
YuukiRey wrote: post #79

I 100% agree. I've ran into the same issues, and I would never use Next.js for anything, and I will encourage every team at work to use something else. In general Next.js has so many layers of abstraction that 99.9999% of projects don't need. And the ones that do are probably better off building a bespoke solution from lower level parts. Next.js is easily the worst technology I've ever used.

Many of the abstractions and nextjs tools do things that my OS does better, cleaner and more predictable too. I suppose the overly complicated ENV/.env loading hierarchy is (partly) needed because Windows doesn't (didn't?) have ENV vars. Same for inotify, port detection, thread management: *nix does it well, consistent ish. But when you want an interface or feature that works on both *nix and windows, in the same way…

Port detection? Thread management? These things have nothing to do with next.js right?

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#208

Post by wild_egg »

DanielHB wrote: post #155
bapak wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is really annoying to stitch together a bunch of tools and libraries that are slightly incompatible with each other This is my job. We're a small team and my job is to keep things up to date. Insanely time consuming. Packages with hard dependencies and packages that stopped being supported 5 years ago.

Yep, been there. It is a lot better these days for React SPAs but it is still a pain. Fact is the only way around this in the frontend without a monolitic "batteries-included" all-encompassing all-knowing all-mighty framework is through standardization which can only be pushed by the browsers. Like if browsers themselves decided how bundlers should work and not have them be extensible. And this tooling-hell is not on…

Advances in the browser standards are slowly removing the need for most client side JS altogether so standardizing on some concept of bundlers would be a step backwards.

Vast majority of web dev projects have zero need for an SPA framework these days and all this pain is self inflicted for little benefit.

Those tools do have good use cases still but the chances that your project is one of them I'd shrinking all the time.

Browser standards have come a long way in filling the holes that caused react to be written in the first place.

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#209

Post by sfn42 »

zwnow wrote: post #168
sfn42 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think React is fine, the problem is that every single react app I've inherited is ass - people just do everything incorrectly and overcomplicate simple things. Components with like 5 different useEffects, huge global state causing all kinds of bugs, way too much frontend logic in general. The amount of JS code that exists just to mimic things you can do with HTML and CSS is staggering. Everyone complains that react…

> Everyone complains that react is so slow and horrible, it isn't. It's their code that's slow and horrible, react is snappy as hell when you use it properly. Why use something that you have to use "properly" when there are things out there that enforce being used properly?

Because I'm not convinced there exists a programming language/library/framework that you can't use improperly.

And just to be clear I'm not saying react is better than Vue. I don't know Vue. Maybe it is better. All I'm saying is react is alright in my experience, the problem is people overcomplicate and mess things up. I've seen that in pretty much every piece of software I've ever worked on, backend/frontend/whatever. So the claim that Vue just magically can't be messed up is difficult for me to believe.

Re: Next.js is infuriating

#210

Post by tjpnz »

Anything related to observability with Next.js is guaranteed to be a fucking nightmare. At work we'll typically implement a metrics endpoint for Prometheus - really trivial for just about every API or fullstack framework under the sun, except Next.js. I think I gave up at the point where the suggested method was using a custom server (negating some of Next.js's supposed benefits), or adopting Vercel's proprietary metrics service which wouldn't have helped us anyway. Terrible, terrible stuff - would never touch again.
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