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Discussion on: Reflecting on a year with Node.js and why I should have stuck with Laravel

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cullophid profile image
Andreas Møller

Next. JS also gives you 80% of the tooling. Why did you choose not to use it?
It seems to me that you had a chance to write a decent post about choosing tech stack, and instead you made yet another "my framework is better than your framework" post.

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owenmelbz profile image
Owen Melbourne

Would be great if you could provide links to all the “nextjs” features that you’ve said are built in such as authentication, queue workers, caching layers, emailing, database?

As far as I can tell (I’ve only built maybe 3/4 nextjs projects) next mainly provides a “route -> view” with some meta/image etc sprinkles built on react, along with obvious SSR and SSG.

What I’ve taken from this post is that the nodejs eco system for full stack development is not mature enough yet to compete “feature to feature” compared to established systems like Rails and Laravel

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tylerlwsmith profile image
Tyler Smith • Edited

Thanks for reading my post, Andreas. I really like Next.js, but I disagree that it gives me 80% of the tooling I need.

Here are features that Next.js doesn't have that Laravel does:

  • Authentication
  • Authorization
  • Encryption
  • Email API
  • Password resets
  • Request Validation
  • An ORM
  • Seeding
  • Migrations
  • Testing Framework
  • CSRF Protection
  • Queues & Scheduling

Instead, Next.js provides React server-side rendering and API routes. If you were referring to NestJS, you can find my answer about why I didn't choose any of the batteries-included Node.js frameworks in the other comments.

I'm bummed that you didn't think this was a decent post and thought it was about saying one framework is better than the other. That wasn't my intention: I'm only sharing my experience about tools that let me me move fast. As I said in the last paragraph, for some developers and for some projects, Node.js will be that tool. It seems to me that you have a chance to write a decent post about choosing a tech stack, and I invite you to share your experience with the community as well.

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cullophid profile image
Andreas Møller

But you chose not to use the default options in NextJS, that's not the same as them not being there.

You move fast in php because you are familiar with php.
I move fast in js because I am familiar with JS and the JS ecosystem.

If it takes you weeks to do something in node and a weekend to do it in laravel then that has nothing to do with either the language or the framework. It's just about the ecosystem.

If you decide that you don't want to learn the JS ecosystem that is absolutely fine. I have made a similar choice about laravel and a ton of other languages and Frameworks. But I am not gonna write a post about why laravel is not as good as node/next

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cullophid profile image
Andreas Møller

Also. Merry Christmas 💖🎄

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tylerlwsmith profile image
Tyler Smith

Andreas,

I think you may have accidentally stumbled into the point of the article. This article is about my experience. I move fast in PHP because I'm familiar with it, which is why this is titled "Reflecting on a year with Node.js and why I should have stuck with Laravel."

The article is not titled, "Reflecting on a year with Node.js and why you should use Laravel instead."

The only concrete recommendation I give is "use the fastest, most productive tool you have available to kick apps out the door quickly and get feedback from your users." For me, that tool is Laravel.

I may not have made that clear enough in my article, so thank you for flagging that. Merry Christmas!

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thinsoldier profile image
thinsoldier

Andreas, please direct me to good tutorials about the JS ecosystem itself.

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wizzymore profile image
EPTIC

I know this is one year old. But what Andreas is saying is not making any sense, NextJS is a front-end framework, it includes nothing that Laravel offers, also, Laravel is a back-end framework, so you comparing the two doesn't even make sense. You either don't know what NextJS is or you talk about NestJS, they are 2 different ends of the world

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tylerlwsmith profile image
Tyler Smith

Wow, it's actually been exactly one year since this was published. Thanks for giving it a read!

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wizzymore profile image
EPTIC

Funny stuff, now what i said is not really true anymore.

Since the new router in Next.js and React Server Components, next.js can really be considered a back-end framework now.

Kudos to the Next.js team for making next.js what php was able to do since day one of the release, but, with included reactivity, which i still don't know if it is good or not. The line of separation between front-end and back-end are now separated by a "use client" text at the top of the file. Weird times we live in