I'm surprised so many people drank the RSC koolaid. I tried it for maybe an hour and it became painfully obvious very quickly how much harder it is to build something that used to be simple.
I just don't understand the use-case either.
Either you're building an SEO-optimized website and you want that initial page load to be as fast as possible. In this case, just build a static website. Use whatever technology you desire and compile to HTML+CSS.
Or you're building an "app" in which case you should expect users to linger around for a bit and that fat initial payload will eventually be cached, so you really don't need to sending it down on every click. So go full-on with the client-side rendering and simplify your stack a little. You can still do a lot of optimizations like code-splitting and prefetching and this and that, but we don't need this weird mixed modality where some things work in one place but not the other.
Which is pretty much what the author says and I'm glad to see people start to realize this.
> Or you're building an "app" [...] So go full-on with the client-side rendering
I wish companies would take this a step further still and just build a PWA. This gives you access to so many web APIs that can further simplify your stack.
I agree that it's bewildering to see how many companies reach for Nextjs for webapps that don't need SEO optimization but some of the more complex rendering strategies can still be useful for web apps as well. Even for PWAs
If you're building an SEO-optimized website you don't even need to build a static website. Just SSR it like normal (you don't even need streaming) and just chuck a CDN-Cache-Control header on there. You'll get responses in 10s of ms.
I'm surprised so many people drank the RSC koolaid. I tried it for maybe an hour and it became painfully obvious very quickly how much harder it is to build something that used to be simple.
I just don't understand the use-case either.
Either you're building an SEO-optimized website and you want that initial page load to be as fast as possible. In this case, just build a static website. Use whatever technology you desire and compile to HTML+CSS.
Or you're building an "app" in which case you should expect users to linger around for a bit and that fat initial payload will eventually be cached, so you really don't need to sending it down on every click. So go full-on with the client-side rendering and simplify your stack a little. You can still do a lot of optimizations like code-splitting and prefetching and this and that, but we don't need this weird mixed modality where some things work in one place but not the other.
Which is pretty much what the author says and I'm glad to see people start to realize this.
> Or you're building an "app" [...] So go full-on with the client-side rendering
I wish companies would take this a step further still and just build a PWA. This gives you access to so many web APIs that can further simplify your stack.
I agree that it's bewildering to see how many companies reach for Nextjs for webapps that don't need SEO optimization but some of the more complex rendering strategies can still be useful for web apps as well. Even for PWAs
If you're building an SEO-optimized website you don't even need to build a static website. Just SSR it like normal (you don't even need streaming) and just chuck a CDN-Cache-Control header on there. You'll get responses in 10s of ms.
and watch your code be 10x easier to reason about.
... oh wait that's what the author ended up doing LOL