Right now I have been working with next js for around 4 months, and in this post I want to share my personal experience with It. We will lock at the Next JS 14 version, the good, the bad and meh about the framework.
Before NextJS I worked with vue and laravel for the frontend and backend respectivily.
This is my personal experience with the framework, feel free to leave a comment if you have a different opinion about it.
The Good
Parallel Routes
I love the parallel routes, there are so nice, the ability to render some page according with some condition or just simple for better structure inside the project it’s something that I really love.
For example I’m building a dashboard for an application, in that dashboard according with the role of the users, some part of the application need to be render or should have more actions, so the skill to just render a specific page or fragment according that page is really nice.
All in one place
If you like to work in a single code base, where in the same project you have your backend and frontend and you know react, nextjs is the perfect fit, I really like how easy is to get an endpoint for some part of my app.
This is really good on small apps or apps that just need a little amount of endpoints. I think for a more complex app it’s better to have a specific framework for the backend like laravel, nestjs, django or gin
The Bad
Developer server
I hate the developer server of nextjs, If not were for the --turbo flag I will not considering next for personal projects. Taking so much time to compile a page, continuous disconnect of sockets, change a color of a button, text, div, and having to wait for 3-10 seconds in the best cases, and I’m talking about small app, it’s somethings that I personal not liked about next.
One of the reasons for this is because sometimes specially when having to make changes in an app that is on production and the users need the change really quick the development server is just a pain.
Web sockets
I don’t like to use sockets on nextjs, just looking at the integration page of socket.io (How to use with Next.js | Socket.IO) feel so weird for me, also combining the fact that the developer server is just a nightmare, I prefer to avoid everything related to websockets and nextjs at least for the moment.
Middlewares
Just why? I don’t like anything about how you are suppose to use the middlewares, they look weird for me, hard to understand and in general not really happy about to use them. Maybe it’s because I don’t have the necessity of using them a lot, so in the future maybe my opinion about middlewares changes, but at the moment they are not my jam.
Final words
I will share my experience when I have 8 months and working more with some part of next (like middlewares, server components, server actions, more third party integrations, etc).
Top comments (0)