Why Next JS is awesome?

1. Seamless typescript setup

It's so easy to integrate typescript into an existing Next JS with just two simple commands

touch tsconfig.json

yarn dev

The yarn dev command will guide you through the installation process.

2. Routing

The files created in the pages folder are considered as each and every route.

/ - pages/index.js
/contact - pages/contact/index.js
/store/store-slug - pages/store/[slug].js

The Link exported from next/link and the useRouter() hook from next/router are easy to use and implement.

3. Deployment

Here comes the most important part. One default solution is using Vercel (opens in a new tab). It just works out of the box for Next JS projects. The next one is using a Node JS server if you have server-rendered components. If you don't have any server-rendered components you can use next build && next export. This command generates a static HTML file with styles in the out directory. This can be deployed easily using Netlify (opens in a new tab)drag and drop for manual deploys or even you can serve it from your own server. There are few drawbacks to the static HTML export feature, you cannot use next/image or getServerSideProps. For more caveats check the documentation (opens in a new tab) If you are using these features in your app you can go with Vercel or even running your own Node server in an EC2 instance.

4. Styling support

Next JS supports every kind of styling from plain CSS, SASS, SCSS, LESS and CSS-in-JS libraries like emotion and styled-components.

5. Documentation

The documentation (opens in a new tab) of Next JS is a very well-written doc. It has answers for most of the queries you would get while working on a Next JS project.

On a closing note, these are few things which I felt Next JS is a good framework to build react projects. There are many other features that make Next JS really awesome. Feel free to drop them in the comments.

Happy Learning!