Description
Next.js is an open-source web development framework created by Vercel enabling React-based web applications with server-side rendering and generating static websites.
Whatâs better about this framework
One of the biggest advantages of Next.js is its ease of use. The framework offers a simple and intuitive API that makes it easy for developers to build complex web applications without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure.
Another key advantage of Next.js is its flexibility. The framework supports a range of different rendering modes, including server-side rendering (SSR), static site generation (SSG), and client-side rendering (CSR). This allows developers to choose the rendering mode that best fits their needs, whether they're building a dynamic web application or a static site.
Finally, Next.js offers a range of powerful features out of the box, including automatic code splitting, optimized performance, and built-in support for static assets like images and videos.
What can we do with it
Next.js can be used to build a wide range of web applications, including e-commerce sites, financial dashboards, blogs, portfolios, and more. It offers a range of features and benefits that make it a great choice for building modern, high-performance web applications.
How we adopted it
When it comes to adopting NextJS, there are a few key steps that we found helpful based on our own experience with the framework:
Back in 2020, our team was pretty experienced with React and we had been following NextJS's track record from their showcase site. We were confident in our ability to trial NextJS for our new e-commerce project, Joolux.
Initially, we mostly followed the instructions from the NextJS documentation, and it was very straightforward for us to adopt. However, we did experience some slow page loading due to long round trips because we had placed the NextJS server too far from the API server.
Despite this incident, the end result was great. The website was fast, thanks to NextJS's ability to configure both server-side and client-side rendering at the same time. Additionally, our development team was pretty happy with the developer experience, as routing, convention checking, and hot module reload were all configured out of the box.
This success gave us the confidence to adopt NextJS further. Currently, we have developed a dozen projects using the framework.