Hacker News Reader

Comment by chris_engel | Hacker News Reader

Partial hydration would have been a game changer in performance of nextJS based websites.

I am a bit perplexed about the new "live" feature. Its just so far away from the framework business (poof, now its an IDE), I have no words for it...

View on HN

I agree. I was a little disappointed to see resources going towards this. It feels like they're seeking ways to create vendor lock-in, which my team fairly aggressively avoids. Next has generally been great about this, and part of the initial appeal. It's just React components inside of an easy-to-understand framework.

This, though - my instinct is to stay away from it, personally. It doesn't seem to be their wheelhouse and it doesn't necessarily make Next.js better.

Next.js Live will have a completely redesigned open-source dev server, which anyone can use to create collaboration features on top – no lock in.

This server has been overhauled to run entirely in the browser, using technology like ES Modules, Service Workers, and WebAssembly.

It sounds like it's removing Webpack from the equation, but how would that work if you have a custom setup with loaders etc?

I had this same reaction to next/image. I see where they're going with it though. They're obviously prioritizing e-commerce publishers because they tend to have high traffic, semi-static content, and a clear business use case for fast websites. They are also the most likely to pay Vercel to host their sites.

As long as features like next/image and "live" remain opt-in and don't otherwise affect build/dev times, I have no problem with Vercel targeting a lucrative market. Anyone who relies on Next should want Vercel to be a long-lasting company.

Besides, this is the first release of "live" – I can see this workflow becoming appealing to marketing and design teams. It's good practice to separate your marketing website from your application, so why not use "live" to enable non-devs to edit it? That's what Jamstack is all about – empowering the marketing/copywriting/product teams to edit content in real time. Maybe "live" is simply the next logical step of Jamstack – teams of non-devs editing the code and design of websites as easily as they can edit their content.

Developers should be all for that, even if they aren't the target audience of the live features. Reducing friction between dev and non-dev is a win for everybody. Marketers are happy because they can edit content without waiting on devs/deploys, and devs are happy because they talked the non-devs out of using WordPress, and got to build a new site with a hot technology.

I wonder if Vercel considers Automattic a competitor. The "percent of the web" stat is a juicy KPI to compete for.

I personally can’t see any benefit of allowing non-devs near code. Personally, any time I’ve seen clients / non-devs near code (or non-content / admin / HTML / CSS type things) that’s when things go bad and I have have to fix things.

I’d be interested to see how this would work in practice but I’m skeptical at the moment.

> Anyone who relies on Next should want Vercel to be a long-lasting company.

Well said, +1. A feature that gets people excited about a product you use, even when you're not the intended audience, is a good thing.

Vercel being a profitable entity is what encourages them to continue supporting Next.js. It's a fine line. The product has to be built in a way for free users to easily pick it up without any immediate, tightly-coupled unavoidable lock-in. Safe to say, if you're depending on Next, you do want Vercel to win.

Great point, and you’re right – I do want to see them succeed. I suppose I just hope success doesn’t end up impeding the framework. As it is we happily pay for staging on their infrastructure, so we don’t have any issues with supporting their efforts monetarily. Hopefully that clarifies my concern better.

I think the real lock in is with serverless deployments. Its currently pretty hard to deploy nextjs to aws lambda on your own.

I thought they would announce a vercel@edge product since they made everything work with webassembly. Maybe later?

I haven't tried deploying it to a serverless platform personally, but surely it's no harder than anything else to spin up on a normal Node server on eg Heroku?

For partial hydration, take a look at:

- Astro[1]

- Microsite[2] (disclosure: I was just added as an owner/maintainer today! But Astro is definitely currently more mature)

- next-super-performance[3]

- Marko[4]

1: https://astro.build

2: https://github.com/natemoo-re/microsite

3: https://github.com/LukasBombach/next-super-performance

4: https://markojs.com/

To me this is just the conflict of interest just kicking in. Next is not built as rails, Django, Vue, etc... Next is a part of their business.

Don't believe it? Just look at the telemetry "feature". Try to disable it...something that should be just a config in next.config.js is a convoluted trap which will only disable it on your machine and you need to remember to disable it everywhere, etc...

As with Facebook (well, not that bad, but still...).Next isn't free.

https://nextjs.org/telemetry

What's the catch here? You can opt out if set an environment variable. You can surely do that on CI as well, if that's your concern.

The catch is that this is intentionally made inconvenient. If it were a config setting I could just put it there,commit, and forget about it.

By making me setting an environment variable you are forcing me to remember to set it up in my infrastructure, on each environment, on each developer laptop, for each project independently, and if my project is open source, good luck with any user remembering/caring to set the env var.

And this is pretty intentional so that people forget or just don't care to disable it.

That's the catch.

https://github.com/vercel/next.js/issues/8851

Next supports loading env variables from files, and as far as I can see, telemetry respects this. Add this line to a `.env` file, and it's done.

As far as I know, it looks like an experiment with Vercel more than anything. It seems the majority of the IDE development has interest beyond this, and this is a framework that wants to be first-class (I could be off on the latter part)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com