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Comment by jypepin | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Next.js for a fairly big e-commerce project for a client, and I have to say it's great.

The framework itself makes working with a React, universal rendering app much easier than other solutions I've worked with. It's doing a great job at starting very small while at the same time extending for your needs is pretty easy for most things (such as build configs, custom server, etc).

The community is growing and very helpful too.

I'm very glad to see it continue to move so fast and definitely already see it as a very strong option and probably becoming the de-facto solution for JS apps, just how Rails or Django are to Ruby and Python.

Thanks to the team for the great work :)

edit: typos

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It's great but not becoming the de-facto. I believe Gatsby is on that path, in terms of popularity they seem to be ahead.

I thought Gatsby is a static site generator?

Yes and in that sense it overlaps next a bit... But next is much more.

In the way that Jekyll and Rails overlap?

It is, but "static site" is just a methodology for delivering content to the browser (static rendered HTML + server side [rendering|hydration] + client side routing). Traditionally people have used static sites for marketing, blogs and documentation but there's no reason why they have to be limited to just those sorts of sites. GatsbyJS's site has tutorials for how you can do authenticated users, ecommerce, etc with it. https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/authentication-tutorial/

Great answer from Tim [1], the lead maintainer of Next on the difference of the 2 (the whole thread is great).

I've never used Gatsby so I can't really judge, but my understanding has always been that Gatsby is mostly focused on static sites. It can definitely do dynamic apps but it being not focused on this would concern me for support / experience of more complex things.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/992n2r/next_vs_gat...

Also learned about Razzle through that thread:

https://github.com/jaredpalmer/razzle

> Universal JavaScript applications are tough to setup. Either you buy into a framework like Next.js or react-server, fork a boilerplate, or set things up yourself. Aiming to fill this void, Razzle is a tool that abstracts all complex configuration needed for SSR into a single dependency--giving you the awesome developer experience of create-react-app, but then leaving the rest of your app's architectural decisions about frameworks, routing, and data fetching up to you. With this approach, Razzle not only works with React, but also Reason, Elm, Vue, Angular, and most importantly......whatever comes next.

Sounds like a really nice alternative to Next.js and Gatsby. Does anyone have any experience with it?

Just finished running a project with Razzle. It’s nice, the only headaches we experienced were with the SCSS plugin and using environment variables. Decent experience.

We're currently migrating from Gatsby to Next (we need things to be more dynamic), and the experience has been extremely painful. The main reason for this is that with Gatsby you end up writing a lot of code in what I call "the Gatsby way", which is very different to how you'd do things in a dynamic site.

One interesting comparison is on imports alone. The old site has 128 imports from gatsby* packages (it's not a very big site btw), the new site has around 10 from next* packages.

I just have to say that Gatsby has a lot of work to do to reduce the amount of boilerplate and tweaking involved for creating say a simple blog site. In some parts I feel they are over-abstracting maybe a little too much at the cost of simplicity. Eg. the spagetti required to render blog-pages from markdown is pretty ugly.

Agree. Gatsby has some nice features out of the box, but learning to use them all isn't easy. As static site generators go, Jekyll was much simpler to learn and get going with.

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