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Comment by duncan-donuts | Hacker News Reader

Late last year I listened to talk on nextjs and I was floored by its design. I still can’t get over that the JS community has embraced file system routing and server rendered stuff. I honestly think I’m taking crazy pills because I could have replaced “nextjs” with “PHP” in most places and it would still make sense.

I have been in software for about a decade and I think I’m experiencing my first complete cycle of “what’s new is old”.

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There are similarities to PHP – and I think that's a great thing! I like to think of Next.js as the best parts of PHP / Rails with the powerful UI engine of React. Especially with the new App Router, where you can fetch code inside components like `await db.query()` and soon easily insert/update/delete from the same file as well.

https://beta.nextjs.org/docs/data-fetching/fundamentals

that's one thing I've been thinking about a lot lately and I think it is confusing for many - that both Next/Nuxt/Remix and Rails have a title of a "full stack" framework while they are pretty different in reality.

Next/Nuxt are coming from the frontend origins and are strongest there, while Rails/Django are coming from the backend and focus on db ORM / data model story via ActiveRecord etc.

I understand the etymology of terminology, but I think we'll probably come up with better names in the future. E.g. Remix briefly called themselves "center-stack" which I found interesting and think makes sense.

I'll keep investigating and probably whip up a blog post about it.

I enjoy interviewing people who have full-stack engineer on their resume, as it means I can ask them about anything from HTML tags to CPU microcode, or from relational algebra to networking stacks, and they'll be able to give a good answer.

Well, when I hear people complain about PHP it's not about the routing or the idea of server-side rendering.

The ancient php idea of mix data fetching and rendering instead of wait until everything done for least `TTFB`(Time to first byte) is still hard to do for a lot of js framework today. You generally need to add tons of hack to the framework so you can print your site header before fetch and print the article body completely. (Which a phper will ask you "why you don't just print it?").

React and vue has add limited streaming rendering support recently, but they are still very limited and you need to met some constraint to actually use it.

It's really something `old is new today`.

"You can't do this old thing, except barely and with great difficulty" sounds like it's close to the opposite of "old is new" to me?

It’s funny to think there was a time when using JS vs JQuery was the biggest division among devs. Now just using JS is considered the baseline and React is the new framework that people jump to when it isn’t always necessary.

Php doesn’t equal file system routing. Look at Wordpress.

Here's your answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=35220064&goto=item%3Fi...

Noob here. What's wrong with file system routing?

There's nothing wrong. But the commentator perhaps isn't aware that PHP isn't enough to write complex and interactive apps.

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