Got back in to react after a few years’ hiatus and I struggle to even understand what the point of Next is. Bizarrely the official docs even reference Next. Are people using react for non-SPA’s? Why?
I'm being rather snarky here, but the main point of front-end JS UI frameworks is to exist and to survive in their environment. For this purpose they have evolved to form a parasymbiotic relationship with others in their environment, for example with influencers. The frameworks with the best influencers win out over older ones that do not have the novelty value anymore and fail to attract the best influencers.
Next is the Microsoft Sharepoint of the JavaScript world. It’s a terrible solution to just about anything, and yet gets crammed into places and forced on people due to marketing-led decision making.
My 10 minute Next build was replaced with a 1 minute 30 second Vite build.
And such an extrodinary different is usually holding the tool wrong, but Next has years old open issues for many of the causes here (like forced output tracing) and has just ignored them. Possibly because the Next team's preferred deployment environment isn't affected?
Vercel has slowly taken over Facebook's position as being the employer of the main developers of React. There's a debate to be had over how much they 'control' it or not, but the fact create-next-app is the first recommended option on the official installation page now does show it's had an impact.
5 or so years ago, Next was a pretty solid option to quickly build up a non SPA, when combined with the static export function. It wasn't ideal, but it worked and came batteries included. Over time it's become more bloated, more complicated, and focused on features that benefit from Vercel's hosting – and static builds can't take advantage of them.
These newer features seem of limited benefit, to me, for even SPAs. Why is there still not a first class way of referencing API routes in the client code that provides typing? Once you reach even medium scale, it becomes a mess of inteprolated string paths and manually added shared response types.
Exactly, this why if I use next.js I always hijack the api routes and use Elysia, it comes with something called eden that makes the typing e2e fantastic, can't recommend it enough.
As a side note, I'm slowly moving out of Next.js, as you said, is bloated, full of stuff that is just noise and that benefits them (more network requests more money) for little user benefit.
Right now for me the gold standard is Vite + Tanstack Router. (And Elysia for api/server, but thats unrelated).
> but the fact create-next-app is the first recommended option on the official installation page now does show it's had an impact.
There is a decent bit of history around that page and whether some things should go in a collapsible div and whether that was prioritizing certain frameworks over other ones.
One thing I'm still salty about is that CRA isn't mentioned anywhere (in the entire site). It's like it never existed.
Hi! I played a major part in getting that "installation" page rewritten to actually mention other tools like Vite :)
The general TLDR is:
- CRA was listed in the _old_ docs site
- The new docs site coincided with the React team emphasizing "frameworks" to provide an all-in-one build experience and hopefully lead to better apps.
- That also meant no ala-carte build tools were listed. This made many people (including me) unhappy.
- CRA broke when React 19 came out in Dec 2024. This caused problems for beginners.
- I pushed the React team to both deprecate CRA and finally rewrite the setup pages to list other build tools as valid options.
I wrote up a much longer background of what happened around the "frameworks" push and this docs page here:
and a follow-up PR where I tried to rewrite the initial rather confusing post-CRA-deprecation "Creating Your Own Framework" page with a more relevant "Creating a React App" page:
but the overall point of _all_ of this is that CRA was unmaintained as of 2023, the community had _already_ moved on to Vite, and all this was an attempt to get the React docs to reflect that reality.
I've been following you and some of the other main React devs.
> That also meant no ala-carte build tools were listed. This made many people (including me) unhappy.
I had followed a decent bit of this back on Twitter, and appreciate you guys trying to make the documentation better (despite all of the drama that came up as a result).
And while it's definitely slowed down a bit, I still randomly see a "What happened to CRA" on the r/react sub.
I guess what bothers me the most is that CRA was not only mine, but quite a few others first introduction to React. And it's just weird that it wasn't even called out in the new docs (even back in 2022-2023). Like it had never existed.
Regardless, I appreciate that you guys care enough to help move React in the right direction. A lot happened while this was going on, and you guys put up with A LOT during this process.
I'm trying to build a nextjs app and it's quite painful. It seems to be more and more focused on SSR, which I don't care about (looking for a static app that calls separate API endpoints). That would have been fine in the NextJS I remember from a few years ago, where static and SSR seemed equally viable, but I can't be bothered now. I'm going to try Tanstack Start.
99% of what you see with the word "server" vs "client" is actually orthogonal to SSR is that wasn't clear.
The React team (really Vercel + Shopify) decided to use the supremely misleading names "Server Component" and "Client Component" for two things that do not affect CSR vs SSR.
Even if you label the root of your app "use client" (thus opting out of all the new complexity around RSC and server actions), it's still getting rendered server side.
After Tanstack Start, Next.js seems even less intuitive. While it remains a viable option due to its established momentum, it feels quite alien to backend devs, esp with its unconventional defaults.
It feels like Wordpress inasmuch as it’s shoving a tool in places that don’t make sense. React is great for SPAs but if I wanted pre-rendered static content I’d use a different tool.
I had had a client cancel a job when they heard it's not going to use Wordpress. It was going to be a dashboard showing statistics (air quality, room bookings etc.) from their facility.
why? jsx is a great language for templating, the ui being a function of state is an incredible model. i am not a huge nextjs fan but React, mdx and friends are great for pre-rendered static content
Isn’t all templates language that way (blade, jade,…)? The main selling point of JSX is being a DSL for React, which present a functional model instead of the imperative paradigm of the DOM API.
If you are dealing with a static site then Astro makes more sense. Renders to just plain HTML while still allowing you to provide interactivity for part of page components using React or any framework by creating what Astro calls an island.
You get best of both worlds, rich interactiveness by using JS and plain HTML/CSS where you need static.
JSX is a nice server side templating language. There a lot of people who aren't dependency conscious, and a lot of people who love react, and there is quite a bit of overlap in those two groups. I've used bun + preact_render_to_string for server side JSX templates before and it was nice. When I did it seemed that bun somewhat embraced react, and I could imagine react being the path of least resistance to server-side JSX there for some of the folks in the aforementioned groups.
It makes sense for sites with a lot of static pages, but you barely need react in that case. NextJS does not perform that well out of the box. I’d argue that a basic SPA with no SSR using something like preact would be a better choice for many building dashboards or applications (not marketing/docs sites). It’s also easier to host & operate and has fewer footguns.
Getting SSR right is tricky and barely even matters for a lot of use cases I’m seeing with Next.
Better server/client integration when it comes to rendering UIs is neat, but there are other technologies that solve for that at a more fundamental level (htmx, phoenix)
Imagine a page that loads html during the first load, and then performs client-side routing during subsequent navigations. Is it an SPA? Is it not an SPA?
