Let's talk about two of the most popular tools in your tech arsenal: React and Next.js.
React, created by Facebook (now Meta), is a library that's all about helping you build powerful apps. But what if you want to add some server-side magic to your React apps? That's where Next.js comes in, it takes your React skills to the next level by allowing you to run your apps on the server using Node.js.
In this article, we'll dive into what makes React and Next.js so awesome and help you decide if they're the perfect duo for your next project.
What Is Next.js?
Initially released in 2016 by Vercel, Next.js is an open-source React framework that provides the building blocks to create high-performance web applications. Major companies have since adopted it, including Twitch, TikTok, and Uber, to name a few. Next.js offers one of the best developer experiences for building fast, SEO-friendly applications. Below are some features of Next.js that make it an exceptional production framework:
Hybrid rendering capabilities
Automatic code-splitting
Image optimization
Built-in support for CSS preprocessors and CSS-in-JS libraries
Built-in routing
What Is React?
React is a JavaScript library used to build dynamic user interfaces. In addition to creating web interfaces, you can build mobile applications using React Native.
Some benefits of using React include:
Improved performance: Instead of updating each component in the DOM, React uses a virtual DOM to update only the changed components.
Heavily component-based: Once you create a component, you can reuse it repeatedly.
Easy debugging: React applications use a unidirectional data flow – from parent to child components only.
Ease of Use
It’s easy to start with Next.js and React. Each requires running single commands in your terminal using npx, which is part of the npm for Node.js.
For Next.js, the simplest command is:
npx create-next-app
With no additional arguments for create-next-app, the installation will proceed in interactive mode. You will be asked for a project name (which will be used for the project directory), and whether you want to include support for TypeScript and the code linter ESLint.
It will look something like this:
(Creating a Next.js application in interactive mode.)
When initializing a React instance, the simplest command includes a name for the project’s directory:
npx create-react-app new-app
This generates a folder containing all the necessary initial configurations and dependencies:
(Creating a React project on the terminal command line.)
While both make it easy to begin, remember that Next.js is built on top of React. So, you can’t learn Next.js without first learning React and understanding how it works. Fortunately, React boasts a gentle learning curve and is great for beginners.
It’s also important to note that React is relatively unstructured. You must install and set up a React router and decide how to handle data fetching, image optimization, and code-splitting. This setup requires you to install and configure additional libraries and tools.
By contrast, Next.js comes with these tools pre-installed and pre-configured. With Next.js, any file added to the pages folder automatically serves as a route. Because of this built-in support, Next.js is easier to work with daily, enabling you to start coding your application’s logic immediately.
Data Fetching
React renders data on the client side. The server sends static files to the browser, and then the browser fetches the data from APIs to populate the application. This process reduces app performance and provides a poor user experience since the app loads slowly. Next.js solves this problem through pre-rendering.
With pre-rendering, the server makes the necessary API calls and fetches the data before sending the application to the browser. As such, the browser receives ready-to-render web pages.
Code Splitting
Code splitting is dividing code into chunks that the browser can load on demand. It reduces the amount of code sent to the browser during the initial load, as the server sends only what the user needs. Bundlers like Webpack, Rollup, and Browserify support code-splitting in React.
Next.js supports code-splitting out of the box.
With Next.js, each page is code-split, and adding pages to the application does not increase the bundle size. Next.js also supports dynamic imports, which allows you to import JavaScript modules and load them dynamically during runtime. Dynamic imports contribute to faster page speeds because bundles are lazy-loaded.
Performance
Next.js is undoubtedly superior in its ability to create better-performing apps with a simplified process. SSR and SSG Next.js applications perform better than client-side rendering (CSR) React applications. By fetching data on the server and sending everything the browser needs to render, Next.js eliminates the need for a data-fetch request to APIs. This means faster load times.
Next.js also provides font optimizations, smart route prefetching, and bundling optimizations. These optimizations are not automatically available in React.
Support
Because React has been around for longer than Next.js, it has a more extensive community. However, many React developers are adopting Next.js, so that community is growing steadily. Developers are more easily finding existing solutions to problems they encounter rather than having to build solutions from scratch.
Next.js also features excellent documentation with comprehensive examples that are easy to understand. Despite its popularity, React documentation is not as navigable.
Summary
Choosing Next.js or React comes down to an application’s requirements.
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