From the course: Master Next.js: Elaborate Hands-On Web Development, React Basics, Advanced Next.js, and Deployment

What is Next.js exactly and its usefulness basics?

From the course: Master Next.js: Elaborate Hands-On Web Development, React Basics, Advanced Next.js, and Deployment

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What is Next.js exactly and its usefulness basics?

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So we've talked about how React is this library of tools and that Next.js acts as a framework around it. What does that even mean? So what the heck is a framework? What that means in programming, it basically implies that Next.js is streamlining the tools from React to make them work better, to set them up in a way that's even stronger and more powerful, more easy to use, more efficient. So Next augments React. You can look at it like that, okay? It further supplements your application. It gives it a predefined structure. Remember we talked about how React is how because there's so many tools to choose from in React and you don't have to do it in any type of way, in that sense there's an openness to React and an unbiasedness. Next.js actually is going to remove some of that openness by making it more biased, by giving it a predefined structure. But with that comes enriched features, performance boosts, defaults for your rendering, so things render faster seemingly magically, but not seemingly magically at all after you take this course, because you're going to know why. When you have a web application, an important way to understand how web applications work is by separating what the client does, the front-end versus the back-end, the server. You can think of the client as the UI, everything happening on the front-end, that UI that we're talking about with the form and the nav. On the client side, that's where Next.js comes in by working with the UI with React. It does client-side rendering, server-side rendering, it has routing, data fetching. All this stuff we're going to learn how it augments React, and what you can do to leverage so when you finish this course, you can go into any React project and say, well, let's make this a Next.js project and increase the server-side, the pre-rendering performance. Let's fix up the routing. Also the server-side, CMS, e-commerce, authorization, database, Lambda functions. Next.js can help you with both. It seamlessly integrates the capabilities into React for fetching, external integrations, and it's supposed to enhance the overall developer experience. So that's really what is meant by Next.js is a framework. All right, now, if that's confusing, well, when we start building and we build a React project, and then we start to add Next.js on top, and you see how it's streamlining things, it'll make more sense to you, especially if you've never worked with React. Hopefully either way, this is putting things in a more clear perspective for you. If it is, that's awesome. We're getting really close now to calling it a day with the slides. We only have two very, very short concepts to cover after this, and then we can actually jump into programming. So patience is a virtue and it shall pay off greatly. I'm as excited as you are to get started with the programming. Let's make sure that we've at least gone through these essentials before we move into the actual code along, into the actual programming. Okay, wonderful. I'll see you whenever you're ready in the next lesson. you

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