Bulma VS Next.js

Tailwind is great, but creating everything from scratch is annoying. A nice base of components which can be extended with tailwind would be great. There are a few tailwind frameworks like Flowbite, Daisy Ui, but I like Bulma, PicoCSS and Bootstrap.

I would talk about building the frontend, but it is just a single page React app I built quickly. It does use a CSS library called Bulma, which is similar to tailwind and worth checking out. I did spend a day implementing a login/signup page, but this was just for the learning experience, and not what I wanted in the final product.

After finding a few spare hours I decided to address the alerts and update some my dependencies. I spent several hours debugging my Gatsby site after doing some recommended npm package updates. My UI class library Bulma was not being loaded by my sass-loader module. (I later learned that they migrated to dart-sass so I guess the fix should have been a pretty easy). Nonetheless, this prompted me to rethink my entire static site generator stack and got me curious about some other options. Why have these unnecessarily complex dependency chains? At that point I was almost too hesitant to even touch my package.json file. That's just silly.

Oh wow, quite happy about this, for a while it seemed the project was abandoned, really glad Jeremy keeps working on this :) The new website (https://bulma.io/) also looks very slick. I could totally see that he'd be able to monetize this like Tailwind, it's a really well thought-out framework with a good compromise between responsiveness, utility classes and components.

So, our post.component.html component is the generic page where all posts will have their content loaded. Here, the classes are from the Bulma CSS framework, and the template looks like this:

This is a pretty basic HTML that contains a form with a couple of form fields and a submit button. To make styling a little easier, I opted to use Bulma. But that’s entirely optional, and does nothing to impact our app.

Since v1.9.0 release, the Gowebly CLI includes support for Bootstrap and Bulma CSS frameworks.

Bulma is a lightweight and modern CSS framework that simplifies the styling of your web projects. It offers a clean and intuitive set of classes to structure and design your HTML elements, providing a quick and easy way to create visually appealing layouts. Bulma is responsive and mobile-friendly, making it an excellent choice for developers who want a straightforward and flexible solution for their projects. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced coder, Bulma's simplicity and versatility make it a popular option for building stylish and responsive web interfaces without the need for extensive customization.

Vite and Next.js are both top 5 modern development framework right now. They are both great depending on your use case so we’ll discuss 4 areas: Architecture, main features, developer experience and production readiness. After learning about these we’ll have a better idea of which one is best for your project.

> It’s important to be aware of what you are getting if you go with React, and what you are getting is a far cry from what a framework would offer, with all the corresponding pros and cons.

Would you like to elaborate on that?

In my experience, with something as great, size/ecosystem-wise as React, there will almost always be at least one "mainstream" package for whatever you might want to do with it, that integrates pretty well. Where a lot of things might come out of the box with a framework, with a library I often find myself just needing to install the "right" package, and from there it's pretty much the same.

For example, using https://angular.io/guide/i18n-overview or installing and using https://react.i18next.com/

Or something like https://angular.io/guide/form-validation out of the box, vs installing and using https://formik.org/

Or perhaps https://angular.io/guide/router vs https://reactrouter.com/en/main

Even adding something that's not there out of the box is pretty much the same, like https://primeng.org/ or https://primereact.org/

React will typically have more fragmentation and therefore also choice, but I don't see those two experiences as that different. Updates and version management/supply chain will inevitably be more of a mess with the library, admittedly.

Now, projects like Next https://nextjs.org/ exist and add what some might regard as the missing pieces and work well if you want something opinionated and with lots of features out of the box, but a lot of those features (like SSR) are actually pretty advanced and not always even necessary.

Next.js: For the website and the admin dashboard

Until the time of writing, there is no official example of how to enable runtime environmental variables in a Dockerized Next.js app, as utilizing unstable_noStore would only dynamically evaluate variables on the server (node.js runtime). There is also an interesting discussion regarding this topic on GitHub.

next.js is a very popular React framework. remix-adonisjs includes more functionality through the AdonisJS backend ecosystem, and should be easier to self-host and self-manage.

Cheryl Murphy is not only a dedicated full-stack web developer skilled in technologies like React, Next.js, and NestJs but also a community-driven professional who recently took on the role of volunteer project team lead at Web Dev Path. With a dual Bachelor's degree in Computing and Chemical Engineering from Monash University, Cheryl’s journey in tech is marked by a passion for building accessible solutions and a commitment to fostering community within tech.

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Remember to start the Next.js server with pnpm dev.