Next.js Explained Simply

What’s up everyone? You've likely heard of NextJS, but maybe it's not exactly clear what it is. In this guide, I'm going to unpack exactly what NextJS is, highlight some features of NextJS, and discuss a bit about how it works. Let’s dive in.

What is it?

NextJS is a React framework for web applications, like dashboards, websites, and more. React is a JavaScript library used for building user interfaces. What NextJS does is it comes in and creates opinionated guardrails for how it believes React should be used in a web application.

While some critics have issues with how much NextJS abstracts away, NextJS removes the need for the developer to stress about bundling or compiling and allows the dev to get straight to work. This means it's incredibly fast and easy to get started with NextJS if you have some understanding of React.

NextJS is extremely popular for a couple of reason. It's used by a variety of companies, both large and small, to create their marketing websites as well as their user dashboards.

One might say that the primary reason it's so popular is that you don't need a computer science degree to use it. Again, critics may not like that NextJS removes the need for the developer to get into the nitty-gritty of configuring their React project, but NextJS's clear documentation, the strong community of developers around it, and the simplicity of its basic infrastructure makes it an approachable framework for developers of all skill levels.

Support is strong in the NextJS community. It's easy to find answers to most questions with a simple search through a search engine, Reddit, or Stack Overflow, and it's not difficult to find a quick template that can get most people up and running in a few minutes. There are many single-click deployment templates that use NextJS and Vercel to spin up new projects quickly.