Book Image

Real-World Next.js

By : Michele Riva
Book Image

Real-World Next.js

By: Michele Riva

Overview of this book

Next.js is a scalable and high-performance React.js framework for modern web development and provides a large set of features, such as hybrid rendering, route prefetching, automatic image optimization, and internationalization, out of the box. If you are looking to create a blog, an e-commerce website, or a simple website, this book will show you how you can use the multipurpose Next.js framework to create an impressive user experience. Starting with the basics of Next.js, the book demonstrates how the framework can help you reach your development goals. You'll realize how versatile Next.js is as you build real-world applications with step-by-step explanations. This Next.js book will guide you in choosing the right rendering methodology for your website, securing it, and deploying it to different providers, all while focusing on performance and developer happiness. By the end of the book, you'll be able to design, build, and deploy modern architectures using Next.js with any headless CMS or data source.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Part 1: Introduction to Next.js
5
Part 2: Hands-On Next.js
14
Part 3: Next.js by Example

Static site generation

So far, we've seen two different ways of rendering our web apps: on the client side and server side. Next.js gives us a third option called static site generation (SSG).

With SSG, we will be able to pre-render some specific pages (or even the whole website if necessary) at build time; that means that when we're building our web app, there might be some pages that won't change their content very often, so it makes sense for us to serve them as static assets. Next.js will render these pages during the build phase and will always serve that specific HTML that, just like SSR, will become interactive thanks to the React hydration process.

SSG brings a lot of advantages when compared to both CSR and SSR:

  • Easy to scale: Static pages are just HTML files that can be served and cached easily by any content delivery network (from now on, CDN). But even if you want to serve them using your own web server, it will result in a very low workload...