Tutorials on Next Js

Learn about Next Js from fellow newline community members!

  • React
  • Angular
  • Vue
  • Svelte
  • NextJS
  • Redux
  • Apollo
  • Storybook
  • D3
  • Testing Library
  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
  • Node.js
  • Deno
  • Rust
  • Python
  • GraphQL
  • React
  • Angular
  • Vue
  • Svelte
  • NextJS
  • Redux
  • Apollo
  • Storybook
  • D3
  • Testing Library
  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
  • Node.js
  • Deno
  • Rust
  • Python
  • GraphQL

Comprehensive Guide to Server-Sent Events (SSE): Real-Time Communication

Real-time communication between a server and client is a key requirement for the majority of today's web applications. Server-Sent Events (SSE) is a technology that satisfies this need, enabling real-time server-to-client updates over a single HTTP connection. This article dives into the intricacies of SSE, explaining its fundamental concepts, operation, and use cases to help understand how it facilitates seamless and continuous updates in web applications. To fully comprehend SSE, it's vital to note that it is a unidirectional communication channel. This implies that it's primarily designed for use cases where the server has to push updates to the client.

An In-Depth Understanding of Long Polling

In the ever-evolving landscape, enhancing server-client communication has always been a pivotal goal. A key player in this evolution has been Long Polling . The aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive overview of the Long Polling , its process, benefits, challenges, and where it fits best in web development. Long Polling is a communication strategy between the server and the client where the client sends a request to the server. Instead of an immediate response, the server holds the request until fresh data is ready.

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Unveiling Long Polling, WebRTC, and SSE as Alternatives to WebSockets for Real-Time Collaboration Apps

This blog is dedicated to technologies that can serve as alternatives to the widely-used WebSockets for building real-time collaborative applications. My goal is to help developers unravel the advantages, applicable scenarios, and potential drawbacks of these alternatives, thereby empowering them to select the most fitting technology for their distinct use case. WebSockets have traditionally been the default choice for establishing persistent communication and ensuring low-latency connection for bidirectional data flow between the client and server. These real-time, full-duplex, and instantaneous communication channels are suitable for live applications, chat forums, and gaming platforms. In fact, robust platforms such as Supabase heavily rely on WebSockets to facilitate real-time collaborative features. To learn more Supabase and WebSockets, and how they can be used to create a real-time collaborative app effectively, visit Real-Time Collaborative Apps with Next.js and Supabase . However, WebSockets aren't the only viable option. In this article, we will shed light on three other potent alternatives: Long Polling , WebRTC , and Server-Sent Events .

The Complications of Implementing Real-Time Collaboration Apps and How to Simplify Them

This article aims to tackle the challenges encountered while implementing real-time collaboration and provide insights on how to simplify these complexities. Let's embark on this journey together and make the task of creating a Real-Time Collaboration App easier. Developing a Real-Time Collaboration App is not a cakewalk. There are several facets that make this task challenging. Here are some of the primary hurdles that developers often face: While the task seems intimidating, there are strategies to simplify it. The first step is to select a suitable Tech Stack according to your specific use case. For a real-time collaborative app, the recommended tech stack includes Next.js with Supabase , Tailwind CSS , and Typescript .

A Comparative Analysis between Firebase, Amplify, and Supabase for Your Next.js Application

In this blog, I will explore a critical decision that Indie Hackers and startups often grapple with, which is selecting the ideal real-time database platform for building a Real-Time Collaborative Application with Next.js. My focus in this blog will be on Firebase , AWS Amplify , and Supabase , dissecting their features, limitations, and costs, and ultimately pinpointing the most suitable platform for Indie Hackers. When it comes to platforms for real-time database applications, three platforms stand out: Firebase , AWS Amplify , and Supabase . Each has its strengths, but not all are perfectly tailored to the specific requirements of Indie Hackers, particularly those primarily concerned with developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and swift feature development and testing.

Unveiling the Truth: Why Node.js May Fall Short for Real-Time Collaboration Apps

Navigating through the landscape of real-time collaboration apps presents a number of challenges, regardless of whether one is dealing with a simple chat app or a complex collaborative board. Node.js faces several challenges in the context of real-time collaboration apps, particularly around synchronization , latency , conflict resolution , and scalability . Its single-threaded nature can lead to bottlenecks under CPU-intensive tasks, potentially worsening latency issues and complicating synchronization of user activities in real-time. When it comes to conflict resolution , the platform does not provide built-in mechanisms, requiring developers to implement these features manually, which can be error-prone and inefficient. Regarding scalability , while Node.js handles a large number of simultaneous connections well, its performance can degrade under the computational demands of complex collaborative environments. Node.js also does not inherently offer offline support , which is critical for a seamless user experience in collaborative apps, necessitating additional solutions. Security in Node.js, crucial for collaborative apps, often demands extensive customization and additional modules, increasing development complexity. Resource optimization and ensuring cross-platform compatibility also pose challenges, as they can require a variety of additional tools and libraries to achieve efficient outcomes. This article dives deep into the reasons why Node.js may not measure up for real-time collaborative apps in certain use cases and suggests possible alternatives.

Static Site Generation with Next.js and TypeScript (Part V) - Build Time Access Tokens and Exporting Static HTML

Disclaimer - Please read the fourth part of this blog post here before proceeding. It demonstrates how to statically generate pages with dynamic routes using the getStaticPath() function. If you just want to jump straight into this tutorial, then clone the project repository and install the dependencies. In the previous part of this tutorial series, we encountered a big problem: each getStaticProps() and getStaticPath() function required us to obtain an access token before being able to request any data from the Petfinder API. This meant that anytime we built the Next.js application for production, we had to obtain several access tokens for the Petfinder API: If we were to add more statically generated pages to the Next.js application that depend on data from the Petfinder API, then we would continue to accumulate more access tokens that are scattered throughout the Next.js application.
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Static Site Generation with Next.js and TypeScript (Part IV) - Dynamic Routes with getStaticPaths

Disclaimer - Please read the third part of this blog post here before proceeding. It walks through image optimization in a Next.js application with the component of next/image and Blurhash, an algorithm that generates beautiful, lightweight, canvas-based placeholder images. If you just want to jump straight into this tutorial, then clone the project repository and install the dependencies. When you look at client-side routing solutions for single-page applications, such as React Router for React-based applications, you will find that they require you to define each route and manually map each one to a specific page component. With Next.js, you have a file-system based router that automatically maps each page component within the pages directory to a unique route. No extra code or routing library is needed. The route of a page is determined by the location of its page component within the pages directory. For example, if the page component is defined within the file pages/blog/index.tsx (or pages/blog.tsx ), then you can access it at the route /blog .
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Static Site Generation with Next.js and TypeScript (Part VI) - Client-Side Rendering

Disclaimer - Please read the fifth part of this blog post here before proceeding. It covers how to efficiently build a Next.js application with a single access token that can be used across all getStaticProps() and getStaticPath() functions. It also covers how to export a Next.js application to static HTML. If you just want to jump straight into this tutorial, then clone the project repository and install the dependencies. If all rendering happened on the client-side, then you end up with several problems. For example, suppose you build an application with Create React App . If you disable JavaScript in the browser and reload the application, then you will find the page void of content since React cannot run without JavaScript. Therefore, checking the DOM in the developer console, the
element, where React renders all of the dynamic content, will be shown to be empty. There's also the possibility of the client running on an underpowered device, so rendering might take longer than expected. Or worse, the client has a poor network connection, so the application might have to wait longer for JavaScript bundles and other assets to be fully fetched before being able to render anything to the page. This is why it's important to not blindly render all content with only one rendering strategy. Rather, you should consider taking a hybrid approach when building an application. By having some content pre-rendered in advance via static-site generation (or server-side rendering) and having the remaining content rendered via client-side rendering, you can simultaneously deliver both a highly performant page and an enriching user experience.
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Static Site Generation with Next.js and TypeScript (Part III) - Optimizing Image Loading with Plaiceholder and BlurHash

Disclaimer - Please read the second part of this blog post here before proceeding. It explains the different data-fetching techniques that Next.js supports, and it guides you through the process of statically rendering a Next.js application page that fetches data at build time via the getStaticProps function. If you just want to jump straight into this tutorial, then clone the project repository and install the dependencies. Slow page loading times hurt the user experience. Anytime a user waits longer than a few seconds for a page's content to appear, they usually lose their patience and close out the page in frustration. A significant contributor to slow page loading times is image sizes. The larger an image is, the longer it takes the browser to download and render it to the page. One way to improve the perceived load time of images (and by extension, page) is to initially show a placeholder image to the user. This image should occupy the same space as the intended image to prevent cumulative layout shifting . Additionally, compared to the intended image, this image should be much smaller in size (at most, several KBs) so that it loads instantaneously (within the window of the page's first contentful paint). The placeholder image can be as simple as a single, solid color (e.g., Google Images or Medium) or as advanced as a blurred representation of the image (e.g., Unsplash).
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Static Site Generation with Next.js and TypeScript (Part I) - Project Overview

Many of today's most popular web applications, such as G-Mail and Netflix, are single-page applications (SPAs). Single-page applications deliver highly engaging and exceptional user experiences by dynamically rendering content without fully reloading whole pages. However, because single-page applications generate content via client-side rendering, the content might not be completely rendered by the time a search engine (or bot) finishes crawling and indexing the page. When it reaches your application, a search engine will read the empty HTML shell (e.g., the HTML contains a
in React) that most single-page applications start off with. For a smaller, client-side rendered application with fewer and smaller assets and data requirements, the application might have all the content rendered just in time for a search engine to crawl and index it. On the other hand, for a larger, client-side rendered application with many and larger assets and data requirements, the application needs a lot more time to download (and parse) all of these assets and fetch data from multiple API endpoints before rendering the content to the HTML shell. By then, the search engine might have already processed the page, regardless of the content's rendering status, and moved on to the next page. For sites that depend on being ranked at the top of a search engine's search results, such as news/media/blogging sites, the performance penalties and slower first contentful paint of client-side rendering may lower a site's ranking. This results in less traffic and business.
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Web Components in Server-Side Rendered (SSR) and Static-Site Generated (SSG) in Next.js Applications

Compared to other web development frameworks, Next.js has become very popular because of its support for a number of rendering strategies that result in highly performant frontend applications: By having the content readily available in the initial HTML document, less client-side rendering takes place. All the client has to do is hydrate the components and make them functional. The less dynamic content the client renders, the better the application's performance and SEO. Search engine bots like Googlebot can visit the application, immediately crawl (and understand) its content and rank it high on search engines. If you use Web Components to build your application's UI, then you don't need to worry about the breaking changes that third-party JavaScript frameworks/libraries notoriously cause (as a result of rapid development and release cycles). Your application performs equally as well as (or better than) applications that use these frameworks/libraries. Additionally, the low-level, native APIs of Web Components are based on an official W3 specification and let you develop encapsulated, modular and reusable components (represented as custom HTML elements).
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Fullstack React with TypeScript Masterclass is LIVE 🎉

The Fullstack React with TypeScript Masterclass is now live! 🎉   This Masterclass teaches you practical React and TypeScript for developing apps from idea to completion, along with all the important tools in the React ecosystem. It expands on the material taught in our comprehensive book,  Fullstack React with TypeScript , and gives you over 10 hours of video lessons taught by Maksim Ivanov. By the end of the first module, you'll already have created your environment for React with TypeScript, and you will have completed basic tasks with TypeScript. The subsequent modules then continue your journey through building multiple apps and learning techniques including:
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Static Site Generation with Next.js and TypeScript - Project Overview

Many of today's most popular web applications, such as G-Mail and Netflix, are single-page applications (SPAs). Single-page applications deliver highly engaging and exceptional user experiences by dynamically rendering content without fully reloading whole pages. However, because single-page applications generate content via client-side rendering, the content might not be completely rendered by the time a search engine (or bot) finishes crawling and indexing the page. When it reaches your application, a search engine will read the empty HTML shell (e.g., the HTML contains a
in React) that most single-page applications start off with. For a smaller, client-side rendered application with fewer and smaller assets and data requirements, the application might have all the content rendered just in time for a search engine to crawl and index it. On the other hand, for a larger, client-side rendered application with many and larger assets and data requirements, the application needs a lot more time to download (and parse) all of these assets and fetch data from multiple API endpoints before rendering the content to the HTML shell. By then, the search engine might have already processed the page, regardless of the content's rendering status, and moved on to the next page. For sites that depend on being ranked at the top of a search engine's search results, such as news/media/blogging sites, the performance penalties and slower first contentful paint of client-side rendering may lower a site's ranking. This results in less traffic and business.
Thumbnail Image of Tutorial Static Site Generation with Next.js and TypeScript  - Project Overview

Deploying Next.js Application on Vercel, Heroku, and a Custom Static Server

In this post, we will be looking at Next.js app deployment on different types of servers and using different technologies, such as: We will go through deployment setup on each technology step by step and show the code. Some time ago web-developers shipped their applications in production by hand. They might use FTP or some other protocols to copy built application assets to production server. This approach has a lot of downsides.
Thumbnail Image of Tutorial Deploying Next.js Application on Vercel, Heroku, and a Custom Static Server