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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Next.js gives you prefetching as well as code splitting as well as server rendering.

You get to use all the modern tools that React gives you, an abundance of open source React components, and get an SEO and load time optimized website with minimal configuration. Building a server rendered, dynamic web app is non trivial. Next.js makes it a lot easier.

React coupled with Node.js has been used for SSR since 2015 in sites like PayPal so I'm not sure why you doubt it's veracity. React is a very strong UI library that is more than suitable for multiple rendering targets. It has never been limited to SPA apps. Facebook itself is not a pure SPA app.

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> prefetching

Prefetching is a questionable and a lot discussed feature, do you want to prefetch all the 50 links on my page? Even if you think this a great feature, I am sure the user using your page doesn't like that you abuse his/her bandwidth. Especially those on mobile.

> code splitting

This is not a feature. Automatic code splitting is turn-key-ready in CRA. I wrote this now for the tenth time...

> server rendering

I explained this, if you really need SSR, a plain express/pug blows Next out of the water. Speed, flexibility, routing, everything. There is no single reason to use anything like Next.js. And writing a plain express/pug app is trivial and much easier than React, this is 10 years old tech.

I don't want to sound negative but again why is React as SSR 10x better than typical SSRs? It's not, React is great for real SPAs and Next feels to me like, let's jump on the React hype train and generate organic leads for Zeit.

You're just being nitty and not adding any value to the conversation.

Code-splitting in Next.js is fundamentally different than in CRA: https://nextjs.org/#automatic-code-splitting https://facebook.github.io/create-react-app/docs/code-splitt...

It's automatic, handled server side...and it gets hydrated on the server side if necessary with asynchronous data. The benefits of this on browser performance and developer performance should be self-evident.

Doing a truly isomorphic React app on your own with pure Node.js is non-trivial. As for using pug templates...just...no. You might want to read about why JSX is a thing to begin with.

It's not a hype thing. It's a tool that solves a problem. It's not needed for all applications. For many apps, a SPA is fine. That an engineer has to make evaluations on the trade-offs of various decisions goes without saying...But Next.js is a solid choice for a SSR framework.

Next.js is some over-engineered thing without a proper use case.

If Next.js was good in SEO, nextjs.org would rank well on the search query 'react ssr' but you know what, it couldn't even rank within the top 10. There's nothing, no nextjs dot org, just a Medium article below the fold. Just want to see your face after you convinced your management and your entire team to move to Next and facing how your organic search volume is nosediving...

This whole thing is pure content marketing paired with forum spamming to get people converted to Zeit's products. I am bit surprised that not more 'real users' defend Next.js here, seems like just some maintainers/contributors could show up worshipping Next. This is all too obvious and maybe young devs fall into your trap.

Btw, I know what JSX is capable of and I prefer it over many things but it's not about JSX or pug or whatever. Next.js is abusing a powerful lib/framework for SSR and templating. SSR is much more, e.g. proper routing, read the thread, Next doesn't get routing (the #1 req of SSR) right and wants to do SSR? Sure.

>If Next.js was good in SEO, nextjs.org would rank well on the search query 'react ssr' but you know what, it couldn't even rank within the top 10.

What kind of argument is that? They're not in the business of SEO. If they were SEO consultants, you might have something there but SEO has nothing to do with their business model.

Also, Next.js isn't "good" at SEO, it allows you to server-side render your app, which is required for good SEO.

Sounds like you just have it out for Next.js, or the Zeit team altogether.

> Prefetching is a questionable and a lot discussed feature, do you want to prefetch all the 50 links on my page?

This isn't how Next prefetches with dynamic routing. It fetches the JS required to construct the DOM of those pages, but doesn't execute it. If on one page you have three links to /gallery/a, /gallery/b, and /gallery/c, then gallery.js will be prefetched once. You can confirm this in devtools. Also, prefetching is opt-in.

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