What makes Next.js a Developer's Delight

Next.js is a fast-evolving React framework that supports applications to be server-rendered, or statically pre-rendered or client-side rendered. Certainly the documentation is extensive and exhaustive, but it is easy to get overwhelmed or disoriented when working with such a comprehensive toolkit. However, these key features can be significantly powerful to enhance your experience as a developer.

First things first, rendering. With server-side rendering, Next.js will pre-render your page into HTML on the server when it is requested, thus ensuring your data is always up to date. On the other hand you can also choose for some/all of your pages to be pre-rendered at build time with Static Site Generation. The HTML can be cached by a CDN and served instantly. SSG is in fact the default strategy for pages that do not require fetching external data.

But for pages that do require external data, SSG can lead to data becoming stale at request time and so you would need to re-build the entire app whenever the data is updated, which can be a tedious task. For this problem you have two options –

• Incremental Static Generation – Suppose a page is requested but it hasn’t been prerendered. Here’s what you do – Serve a fallback version of it while Next.js renders the page in the background. Then swap in your page in place of the fallback. The next time there is a request for this page, the pre-rendered page will be served instantly, like SSG. Another trick would be to use a timeout to update data after some intervals.
• Statically generate parts of the page without data, then switch to Client-Side Rendering for fetching the data. This is especially the case for pages where you simply cannot predict the data ahead of a request, eg. – a shopping cart.

Second, writing data to the backend. Next.js v9 introduced the concept of API routes so you could write handlers to hit your backend API endpoints, triggered by events in your frontend.

Third, the simplicity of having a File-based routing system, where the structure of your files, the hierarchy of your folders and files defines the routes. Simply follow the hierarchy from the root folder to the leaf folder which ends with a "page.js" file.

Fourth, there are multiple ways of styling your Next.js application. You can use global CSS to encapsulate styles for the entire app, or CSS modules which have a local scope, eg – "homepage.module.css" to hold styles for the HomePage of your app. You could also integrate with utilities like Tailwind or MaterialUI which make styling considerably easier.

Fifth, and an important one, Optimization, which is essential for an enhanced user experience. Next.js comes with built-in components for implementing common UI optimizations.

Sixth, integration with TurboPack which further enhances local startup time, server refresh and is soon going to be integrated with the build script as well.

NextJS is vast and versatile. Although these are just a few of the remarkable features that come to mind, I encourage you to delve deeper and gain more insights.

Happy learning!