Discovering Next.js: Why It’s My Go-To Framework for React Applications

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In this blog post, I’ll share my experience working with Next.js and why it’s my preferred choice when building large React applications these days.

What is Next.js?

https://nextjs.org/

Before diving into my reasons for choosing Next.js, let’s briefly discuss what it is. Next.js is a powerful, open-source React framework developed by Vercel.

It is built on React, Node.js, and JavaScript. It’s designed for production ready React web applications. Next.js comes with all the opinions built into it, making it a full blown framework.

Next.js is a React framework for the web.

Alright, let’s discuss some of the key reasons why I love working with Next.js:

Production Ready Framework

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In the past, while working with React applications using the Create React App (CRA), you would simply get a bare bone folder structure to begin with. Decisions will have to be made on how to build your React applications.

Decisions on Routing, Data Fetching, Server-Side Rendering, Bundling, SEO, Code Splitting and many more was usually time consuming. This is because React is a flexible library, and allows you to make these decisions yourself. It is kind of nice and provides flexibility, but you do spend lot of time making these decisions on larger projects.

Next.js comes with all the nuts and bolts put together.

With Next.js, you do not have to worry about making these decisions for your app. Instead, it comes with all the nuts and bolts put together. Routing, SEO, Optimization, Data Fetching, SSR, Code Splitting, and many more are built into the framework. This means, you can simply focus on building high-quality React apps, without having to worry about what router to use, or how to optimize the…