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

Data fetching

As seen in the previous chapters, Next.js allows us to fetch data on both the client and server sides. Server-side data fetching could happen in two different moments: at build time (using getStaticProps for static pages), and at runtime (using getServerSideProps for server-side rendered pages).

Data can come from several resources: databases, search engines, external APIs, filesystems, and many other sources. Even if it's technically possible for Next.js to access a database and query for specific data, I'd personally discourage that approach as Next.js should only care about the frontend of our application.

Let's take an example: we're building a blog, and we want to display an author page showing their name, job title, and biography. In that example, the data is stored in a MySQL database, and we could easily access it using any MySQL client for Node.js.

Even though accessing that data from Next.js can be relatively easy, it would make...