Background

Next.js was open-sourced 25th October 2016. The company behind Next is called ZEIT.

Next.js is backed by an organization which is stable and is also very active in the open-source world. Next is not going away in a couple of months and most likely is here to stay.

So there you go – we’re officially in the age of server-side rendered react apps. This raises a lot of questions, such as:

Why should I care? I already know how to make quality React apps.

Great question. The answer is that we should always be open to new concepts and learning new things. Remember, being a developer means being a student for life. Next can improve your life as a developer.

If we asked “why should I care” every time a new technology came out we would be stuck with 90’s development tooling.

When jQuery came out — a revolution due its ease of use— you could have asked “why care at all?” and just keep using vanilla Javascript. But must admit it improved almost every code base and made life just a little bit easier for all of us.

In the end, innovation will win — why not be an early adopter?

How Next Can Improve Your Life

Ease of use . Forget about setting up webpack, react router, react and react-dom. It’s all included right out of the box!

. Forget about setting up webpack, react router, react and react-dom. It’s all included right out of the box! Code splitting out of the box.

out of the box. Performance for first-page load.

for first-page load. Improved SEO .

. Javascript everything! (We’ve all heard this before, ahem MongoDB and Meteor). Meteor is great and all — I even have a production project with Meteor and MongoDB but Next is the next (pun intended) evolution step. Next got a lot of things right (most importantly — its simplicity).

Curious about the benefits? Here’s a full in-depth article explaining the details.