For a simple static site, is this a better option than Gatsby?
Bonus: Next's built-in API support makes building quick APIs for your project (and its static/hybrid/dynamic) data loading a breeze. While not suited for everything, at the very least, Next and Airtable can get your POC/MVC/prototype running in a day.
The few times I tried to build something in Gatsby I was bogged down in mediocre documentation and a mountain of (maybe?) necessary plugins. I don't know.
Not sure how to feel about Gatsby's GraphQL-first approach either.
Forcing everything to go through graphql is also a pain and adds an unnecessary indirection that requires a million extra dependencies.
Perhaps it was just that Gatsby felt closer to react-static’s model and it was more readily apparent how to adapt a react-static site to Gatsby with as few changes as possible, using their createPage api to replace the route config in react-static and bypassing all the GraphQL as described in https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/using-gatsby-without-graphql/ - I didn’t have time to do a detailed comparison of frameworks or rebuild large parts of the site.
I was pleasantly surprised how quick and easy the migration was, took me about 90 mins for a site with about six templates and Gatsby seems to build faster and has a much better ecosystem of plugins etc. I wrote up the process at a high level at https://github.com/react-static/react-static/issues/1203#iss... if anyone is interested in the specifics
Did I understand correctly that next.js isn’t just a static site generator and ideally you have a server side component too? This was what started confusing me in their docs, but perhaps I got the wrong end of the stick.
I’ll have to give next.js a proper look next time I’m building a site from scratch anyway!
It's a dead-simple MD -> HTML generator that uses React for templating. No JS code on the client, unless you import your own scripts.
Some time ago I've decided to rewrite a landing page, written in Node + EJS templates + JQuery, using some kind of static generator. I have always heard good things about NextJS as well as Gatsby, but after some exploration I decided to go with NextJS, since Gatsby seemed more complex and better suited for CMS/other complex websites rather than a simple, light landing page.
The developer experience has been amazing. Plus, I've found an awesome library[0] for dealing with i18n, which completely absorbed the pain of dealing with multiple languages: getting SEO right, make links work, and so on.
Plus, pairing NextJS with PReact, brought my pages first-load size down to ~40KB (external resources excluded), which I didn't think it was possible for something built with React.
The only things that I missed from CRA-like apps were environment variables, which have been added with this release, and a good integration with third-party tools like eslint, typescript and prettier. I did not use typescript because it was just overkill for a simple landing, and I'm launching eslint by hand and in the CI, so I really miss how good the integration is when developing a normal React App bootstrapped with CRA (which has all of this awesomeness out of the box).
However I had to switch to Gatsby because of its superior support for responsive images.
With Next I couldn't find a way to cache all the generated variants of images between builds, which made the site take more than 5 minutes to build.
Gatsby ecosystem seems more mature also.
Imo, simpler if you don't require dynamic views.