Guillermo Rauch - Next.js: Universal React Made Easy and Simple - React Conf 2017

today I'm talking about nextjs which I hope many of you are already familiar with it but if not uh it's a simple framework for several rendered universal applications with react the main idea is very similar to what Tom was talking about with create react app there is a an opportunity to make starting with react develop development much easier but at the same time there's an opportunity to make it really really simple by taking advantage of the fact

that react is a very Universal Paradigm as it is for any kind of UI related work so before I go on with the talk and all these ideas and features I'm going to Define some of the things that I want to talk about today so by Universal I mean that it works everywhere so we can decide to do some work ahead of time on the server stream it to the client the client can pick up and do more work um on both ends you can share code views Etc react is Cool Tech I he uh it's easy

and this one is actually so to speak easy to uh come up with because next makes starting a project one command so it's kind of indisputably e easy but the more interesting claim that I'm going to try to prove today is is it actually simple so some of the ideas that I refer to when I talk about simple are for example well-defined boundaries of the project what is it exactly that it does does and where are the limits of what it does and where does user land start and where do other community projects

begin uh does it actually support emergent behavior and by by this I mean can it um take other uh simple pieces to create more complex and more interesting projects and applications and does it behave predictably and consistently so a lot of the ideas that next uh takes for example for how it performs navigation are actually taken from the browser a lot of what it's trying to do is merging the world of how the web used to work with

all the new exciting possibilities that heavy and fat clients come with and by predictably and consistently I also mean that it takes you only a little time to learn and you probably can go through the entire rhym me in maybe like 10 20 minutes so we take the Simplicity of react we make it easy to use so that we can amplify its reach so ideally

everyone can create any sort of UI application with this and it all started with a paradox for me because I spent a lot of time probably like many of you here on Hacker News the Paradox is how does a website with so many trolls stick around today no just kidding the the Paradox is how come we're all debating like all this like awesome uh futuristic UI paradigms and like State Management tools on our websites largely hasn't been changed since 2007 probably way back it's really awesome 1990s Tech no JavaScript no

single page application no framework rewrite every month or every day and the answer is actually because in my opinion it works really well it loads fast the server uh from what I've read has an inmemory cache of all the stories that you know the data set is not that big um they produce some templates that start rendering right away it's you know it's as good as it gets actually building hacker prob easy and simple for it has remained this way for a very long time unchanged it's survived without having

to do much and still performs its duties relatively well so I wanted my solution to this problem uh that is creating universal applications to be able to uh straddle across this really powerful client-oriented application but also serve the needs of simpler apps like that so you could create a documentation website or you could create a really powerful real time chat