Finished 1st round of Next.js official tutorial; Some thoughts about Next.js

Last updated on 8 Sep. 2024

Today (8 May 2024) I finished a first round of the official Next.js tutorial: https://nextjs.org/learn . The resultant app is deployed on Vercel with valid user credentials being: Email: user@nextmail.com, Password: 123456. A related post is: Notes on learning Next.js - 1st round and 2nd round. [8 Sep. 2024 update: The previously mentioned post also covers a second round of studying the official Next.js tutorial which was from 18 May 2024 to 23 May 2024. end-8 Sep. 2024 update]

The final tutorial app. demonstrates quite a few interesting features like optimized fonts and images that avoid CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift), streaming and loading skeletons, search using database query instead of client side filtering, pagination, React Server Actions to mutate data, graceful error handling, authentication using NextAuth.js and adding metadata to app.

The app. has tons of code with TypeScript and Tailwind code being somewhat new to me and so  a little challenging.

But the invoices part of the final app. which is the focus of the tutorial, looks good. So the tons of code may be worth it. 

An interesting thought is to see if such a UI is possible with leading low code or no code tools/dev. platforms. If that's possible with low code / no code tools/dev. platforms, and all other things are somewhat equal, then Next.js may be an overkill for small to medium sized web projects. I mean, there is a lot of code and so it will be challenging to maintain the app as it will need people who know Next.js to maintain it.