NextJS is still the best app framework
13 Apr 2024
I don't think it's a controversial take anymore to say NextJS is a bloated framework. As app router continues to be notably slower than the pages router, turbopack's takeover slows, and React's vision clashes with the popular views of the community on social medias like X. While I've looked for a long time for an alternative (Express + HTMX comes close to offering the flexibility and robustness), thanks to Vercel's investments in shadcn/ui and v0 have kept NextJS as the clear winner.
It wasn't very long ago where NextJS had a simple architecture, or at least a simple one to grasp. As Vercel took on the vision of React in its holistic adoption of RSC it paid for being the early adopter by losing its simplicity, succumbing to having to have its own set of documentation and dealing with the controversial adoption of canary React.
While they have mostly recovered from this adoption, the slow speeds of RSC and complex mental model have left big scars on the perception of the framework, leaving room for competitors like HTMX.
Into the picture steps shadcn/ui. A fresh ui framework which pitches components that give a "Vercel style" built on top of the fast growing radix ui with a high level of polish and most notably, are copied into your repo instead of npm installed. This fits perfectly into the build fast mentality of Vercel. I'm sure there is more to the decision making that goes on under the hood but to an outsider it seems like the perfect fit for their upcoming project v0.
v0 is an ambitious usage of AI to not only to generate UI's (something that ChatGPT can do with enough persistence), but a creative component library driven by React interfaces that can be dropped into any NextJS project. While it was a bit minimal at launch, as with all Vercel products they've stuck with it and developed an unmistakable productivity win for developers.
Thanks to these 2 projects, I think NextJS is currently the best framework for most app like websites. It is unmistakable that with a template like the prisma turborepo starter you can unthinkable MVP speeds by utilising v0 to build your initial views with shadcn/ui to power it all. Also, you can't not mention the ease of use of turborepo which unlike its sister project turbo pack is incredibly well looked after and I'd consider compelte for node based projects (I use it myself at my work at GLX Digital).
Unfortunately over the years of perfecting this stack, Vercel has neglected static sites. I still consider Eleventy as the best static site generator for it's simplicity and speed, but hopefully one day Vercel will consider reinvesting in the concept possibly to compete with projects like Astro.
In the meantime, have fun making use NextJS with shadcn/ui and v0 to build fast!