After trying my hands in the basic yet the foundational and most important tech heroes i.e. HTML, CSS and JavaScript, for more than an year, here's to the beginning of my journey of learning the well-known full-stack framework - Next.js🎉.
Let's have a look in what Next.js actually is.
What is Next.js?
Next.js is a framework built on top of popular JavaScript library, React. It helped in addressing the major issues such as inefficient SEO, complexity in managing the component and it's state and processing overhead.
Besides, it also introduced the efficient rendering strategies like Server-Side Rendering (SSR) & Static Site Generation (SSG) which added to the ease in development of SEO friendly and high-performance web applications.
Advantages of Next.js
Being a trending and widely used framework, Next.js has many advantages such as:
1) Seamless file-based routing
2) Efficient code splitting
3) Image & font optimization
4) HMR (Hot Module Replacement)
5) API Routes (backend)
6) Built-in support for Sass (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets)
7) Data fetching choice
8) Error handling
9) Metadata API (For SEO)
and the list goes on.
Why is Next.js so popular and why most of the developers prefer it over React?
As I already mentioned, Next.js is a React-based framework which not only extended it's capabilities but also reduced the dependencies on number of isolated tools like the ones for server-side handling, databases, routing, etc. And now we've a one-stop solution for the development of full-stack (i.e. both frontend and backend) applications, our very own Next.js.
One of the most interesting feature of Next.js, that I recently learned, is file-based routing i.e. we can define the paths of different pages in our application based on the file & folder structure within our code. It includes concepts like dynamic routing, nested routing, routing groups and many more.
Though React also had it's own routing library called React Router and the React Server Components for server-side handling, Next.js provided everything within a single framework without having the need to rely on external tools and provided us with the choice of deciding which components to render on client-side and which one on the server-side.
Although Next.js facilitates us with comparatively easier way of developing web applications and is mostly seen at the first place, it's not like it has completely replaced React. And it totally depends on one's need and the requirements of the applications or website they're building, which one to choose Next.js or React, as they both have their own benefits.
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