Gridsome VS Next.js

Thanks for reading!

The web tech stack is actually one of my biggest regrets. It's a static site generator called Gridsome[0] that the maintainers abandoned about three months after I used it to launch the TinyPilot website.

At the time I made the TinyPilot site, I was very excited about Vue, so a Vue-based SSG seemed great. Since then, I've come to find SPAs and most frontend frameworks to be way too much complexity, so I've moved away from Vue, but the TinyPilot website is still stuck on Vue 2.x and bootstrap-vue (which is tied to Vue 2 and Bootstrap 4).

So, it keeps creaking along, but building the 100ish pages on the site takes about five minutes, whereas I think something like Hugo could probably do it in a few seconds. Plus, we get random runtime errors[1] that are pretty hard to debug.

[0] https://gridsome.org/

[1] https://github.com/nuxt/nuxt/issues/5800

Nuxt.js and Gridsome are tailor-made for Vue.js developers.

Gridsome — Jamstack SSG tool for Vue developers

Node is basically back-end Javascript. While powerful alone, almost exclusively you will use a back-end framework like Next.js or Gatsby when using React, and then maybe Nuxt or Gridsome in Vue.

Among other thoughts, I considered a possibility of migration to a newer tech stack (because I can). Don't get me wrong, I actually love Gridsome (which is underneath my website now). But it's quite obsolete, and it's actually a dead project now.

One downside of Gridsome is that development seems to have stopped if you look at their github. For that reason I've recently switched my Gridsome clients to Nuxt

I definitely think Nuxt is worth learning for more than just a static site. However, there is a Gatsby-like Vue framework that focuses on SSG: https://gridsome.org/

Gridsome

All the Static Site Generators have been in the market for many years. With time, they get new improvements and upgrades as well. While considering SSG frameworks, like Gatsby, Nuxt, Gridsome, Next, and many more have been on the developer’s list for a long time. But when we talk about blazing fast web performance as per core web vital, then we have to do a lot of work in the available frameworks, after connecting a lot of dots (in terms of web performance), but still, we cannot achieve the web performance as per our need if we consider a use case of a large website where 20+ components are in one page.

Next.js has long cemented itself as one of the front runners in the web framework world for JavaScript/TypeScript projects so we’re going to be using that. More specifically we’re going to be using V14 of Next.js which allows us to use some exciting new features like Server Actions and the App Router.

Web frameworks like Next.js will usually include this feature, but do check that they set the caching headers correctly!

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.

For more information, check out this issue.

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