When you want to build an application using React.js, there are too many options - Create React App, Redwood, Vite and many more.

Introduction

Each of them have thier unique use-cases. For example, Redwood is a full-stack framework built on top of React.js and Prisma. So, if you are building a full-stack application, you can use that.

If you want to build only a client-side application, you can consider using Create React App. However, I feel that if you want to have the best developer experience while building front-end applications using React.js, you should consider using Next.js.

Why Next.js

Next.js is a framework built on top of the React.js library and provides the best development experience with a host of features like SSR and SSG, Image optimization, support for TypeScript, i18n and many more.

Next.js has been around for a long time but gained popularity in the recent years. I have been using Next.js for more than two years. Almost any front-end application that I build now, I use Next.js and I think that you should too. Next.js comes with the best development experience that I have come across.

Let's discuss some of these features in more details and how they make Next.js stand apart from the rest of the options.

SSR and SSG

Next.js comes with two forms of pre-rendering:

• Server Side Rendering (SSR): In this case, the HTML for a page is generated everytime the client requests for it.
• Static Site Rendering (SSG): In this acse, the HTML for a page is generated at build time and will be reused when a client requests for it. No regeneration of HTML happens in this case. SSG was introduced in version 9.3.

Image Optimization

Next.js ships with an Image component which does a bunch of performance optimizations for your application. Your Next.js application will have good Web Vitals if it uses the image component. The image component is built for the following things:

• Improve the performance of your application.
• Reduce Cumulative Layout Shift.
• Lazy load images with optional blurred placeholder.
• Support for resizing of images.

Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR)

With Incremental Static Regeneration, you can pre-render your pages using SSG but update those pages after a fixed amount of time. ISR gives the option to re-generate pages which have been generated during the build time.

File-system based Routing

In a Next.js application, any file inside the pages directory is available as a route. This enhances the development experience of any application. In a typical React.js application, you will have to configure and define your routes in a separate file. However, in Next.js, creating a new route is as easy as adding a new file inside the pages directory.

API Routes

Using API routes, it's possible to connect to a database and create up a back-end application which can generate the data necessary for your front-end. When a new file is added in the folder pages/api, it is mapped to /api/* and is treated as an API endpoint and not as a page.

Learning Next.js

The best way to learn Next.js is via Next.js Learn. If you go through the course once, you will be able to understand what Next.js offers. You can also check out the documentation for further details.

Conclusion

The fastest way of creating a new Next.js application is downloading a suitable example application from the examples directory. You can also bootstrap a new Next.js application using their CLI.

I feel that Next.js is improving with every release and they are now investing in Rust-based tooling. I'm pretty excited about what innovations Next.js will bring in the JavaScript eco-system.