Server-Side Only React with Next

Depends on what you're building. Client side rendering vs SSR have both different trade-offs and performance implications, and it's best to evaluate which is better for your use case.

For a blog or mostly static webpage? SSR is probably the better choice. But there are many times where serving a minified React bundle to the client and letting it do all of the rendering work is better. It's actually a much lower strain on your server, because all you're doing is serving static files from behind a proxy like Nginx, whereas with NextJS your server incurs significant performance overhead from having to evaluate each page view in JS. Imagine this for a million visitors at once when you have content that cannot be statically cached.

Re: Server-Side Only React with Next

#5

Post by davnicwil » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 10:01 AM UTC

This is cool, and you make it clear it's an experiment, but I'd just like to ask you in a bit more detail on the part about not just using React SSR directly because you felt you were just reimplementing Next - to me most of the value Next brings is abstracting away the isomorphic stuff, making everything work the same on client and server in a seamless 'app-like' structure.

But since you don't need the client, you don't need any of that, right? Seems like without having to structure the server code in the same way you'd structure client code, things just get a lot simpler and the native React SSR stuff should be fine to use directly. Just curious which other features of Next you found you wanted for a server-only app?

Re: Server-Side Only React with Next

#6

Post by fidelramos » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 10:03 AM UTC

jamil7 wrote: post #3

Isn't SSR React notoriously slow? Whats the benefit here over a standard templating language?

You can use the same components in server and client-side rendering, which can be very useful in many cases.

Re: Server-Side Only React with Next

#7

Post by tarruda » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 10:05 AM UTC

jamil7 wrote: post #3

Isn't SSR React notoriously slow? Whats the benefit here over a standard templating language?

Never used SSR React, but one possibility comes to mind: It makes easier for single page JS apps to have compatibility with browsers that have JS disabled by allowing more code reuse between JS and no-JS versions.

Re: Server-Side Only React with Next

#8

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 10:12 AM UTC

tarruda wrote: post #7

jamil7 wrote: post #3

Isn't SSR React notoriously slow? Whats the benefit here over a standard templating language?

Never used SSR React, but one possibility comes to mind: It makes easier for single page JS apps to have compatibility with browsers that have JS disabled by allowing more code reuse between JS and no-JS versions.

[deleted]

Re: Server-Side Only React with Next

#9

Post by deltron3030 » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 10:18 AM UTC

Something similar also based on Next called Blitz that popped up recently.

https://github.com/blitz-js/blitz

RedwoodJS, a new rails like full stack framework for JS is also very interesting: https://github.com/redwoodjs/redwood

They focus on a classic server side Rails like workflow but embrace the separation of API and clients on the technical side, for a future as a multi frontend framework (web, mobile etc.).

Re: Server-Side Only React with Next

#10

Post by mcjiggerlog » Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 10:23 AM UTC

jamil7 wrote: post #3

Isn't SSR React notoriously slow? Whats the benefit here over a standard templating language?

In the way it's being used here it is rendering out every page to a bundle to be served as a static site - there is no server side rendering to speak of really.