If you are trying to share context between middleware (backend) and rendering (frontend) literally rather than logically (via request-id only) then that seems to stem from a fundamental misconception of the distinction between backend and frontend to me ...

I suspect all these "all-in-one" JS frameworks out there unfortunately made people think that web apps are made of "one big happy javascript application, yay!" while it's really two (or even three) entirely decoupled runtimes (backend & frontend) instead.

There you go. We are now past the honeymoon period of yet another web framework.

This one has been the most over-hyped, vendor locked-in and completely vulnerability ridden web framework I have ever seen.

> You think I'm joking? There are hundreds of issues with as many emojis with no official response for years. And when you finally get a response, it's to tell you that what you're doing is wrong and a solution to your real problems is on the way. Then they proceed to keep the "solution" in canary for years on end.

It's so much easier to hire people to do prioritisation (or deprioritisation) or code of conduct enforcement or whatever than to just do good work.

There are so many frameworks in this fast-moving space that I need mnemonics to keep track of which ones are well-regarded and which aren’t. Looks like this one is easy. Next.js? Next.

As an experienced dev who has explored almost all possible JS options - including but not limited to - React, Angular, etc. and settled for Phoenix/Elixir, I can tell you nothing comes close to the peace of mind you get from just opening up a text editor, naming a module whatever the fuck you like, writing functions, piping the results, validating with `with..do..else` and the best part - catching errors at compile time. Everything just works - even after 5 years. Whereas, with JS, something keeps getting burned down every 6 months or less even if you didn't touch the code at all.

Seriously, give Elixir a shot.

Similar experience here.

Next.js is 8 years old and still under-documented, and you will still get lost if you veer off the beaten path - of which sometimes there is none.

Frankly, I was mad at myself for not recognizing the hubris and their ignorance of web dev history when I noticed that they brought back directory based path convention from the 90s. That should’ve been the red flag that stopped me but I fell for Vercel’s fonts and web design.

Investing in an implicit and inflexible routing pattern such directory based routing that was used when we didn’t have nice things is like being a rich hippie. Oh it doesn’t stop there. Isn’t it cool that you get to (jk, you HAVE TO) name your files like ‘[path-that-takes-arg].tsx’? You may think that I used brackets as a placeholder signifier, but I didn’t! Brackets are part of the filename and they indicate that this route takes params.

Look, we all tried and maybe had a little too much fun inventing and sometimes reinventing clever patterns we shouldn’t have, but few of us doubled down and just ran with it for so long.

Luckily, you can get around the pattern above pretty easily by just using the one route as a router file and adding your own indirection. Obviously you miss out a bit on tree-shaking and probably some other optimizations they designed to rely on their implicit conventions but your codebase remains greppable.

I’ve never used Next.js. To be honest, Express has always gotten the job done without too much hassle. In theory, what are the benefits of using Next.js over Express?

Shameless self-promotion, but I think people who agree here would enjoy my full-stack framework [1]. Just launched a new update that's much faster and has a lot more features. It was built for SaaS first, but works just as well for a traditional website. The ethos is "no rug pulls; it just works." Not the usual time waste of JS frameworks.

[1] https://cheatcode.co/joystick

Folks will deal with all of this crazy stuff just to avoid using Ruby on Rails, Phoenix, Django, etc. Why? Is Next.js that much better for the user? I doubt it.

I've just convinced a large, but not global, client to move from their antiquated system to Next.js. They definitely wouldn't want to run on Vercel in prod since they're obsessed with costs.... and now I'm really concerned since this and some other "next.js in production nightmares" posts have dropped. I've only ever run smaller stuff on Vercel. Super concerned.