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The Story of Next.js: How One Framework Tried to Fix the Web

Homayoun Mohammadi on July 07, 2025

Have you ever clicked a link and waited… and waited? Not just a brief pause, but long enough to wonder if the page would ever load? Back in 2015, ...
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david duymelinck

Everyone knew the web was broken. But no one had a solution

The web was not broken. There were, and are, too many layers on top of the technology that powers the internet. The fix is to reduce the layers.

The big problem with Next is that it has a hard dependency on React.
A framework like Astro lets you choose the template library.
And Nest.js doesn't even has a link to the frontend code.

While Next was a good step in the right direction. It just doesn't go far enough.

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Homayoun Mohammadi • Edited

Yeah you're right I update the part thanks

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david duymelinck • Edited

Everyone could feel it the web was breaking. But no one had a real solution.

While i understand you have a narrative, it feels like an insult that your post singles out one person like he is some kind of prophet.

As a developer that specialized in backend work, I never understood the need to move templating from the server to the browser. Servers are meant to push as much data as needed a fast as possible to the browser. Why let people wait after all the data is pushed to generate code, html and CSS, that can come from the server.

For a big company it will mean running less servers, but at what cost? bad SEO, users looking at spinners.
And then they go back to server side rendering. They had to invent a term to make it acceptable again. But that is what backend frameworks were doing long before Node existed.

I think there are good things that came from the SPA era like components and websockets. But I think it time to let the SPA peak libraries go, and get back to the proven methods of creating websites.

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ArtyProg • Edited

Everyone knew the web was broken. But no one had a solution

There is now a beautiful solution, look at this , it is a really game changer in web developement

Juris
JurisDoc
Examples
Playground
Tests

No more NodeJS, JSX, Bundler, no tons of insecures modules.
Code directly in your favorite editor and you are done

The official site is contained in a single HTML Page !!!
That is the case of all the examples.

Try the awesomness of Juris
I am not th e author

Please give it an eye and tell what you think

Regards

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Homayoun Mohammadi • Edited

Thanks I will check them

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KC

Isn't Juris still a new framework?

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ArtyProg • Edited

As I said Juris is a radically new approach.
The author has been working on it for 9 years.
It can be used as a library or a framework.
Give it an eye :-)

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SMI • Edited

And still, Angular is the better Framework where the learning curve might look harder (but trust me it's not, especially with the newer versions) but then you'll enjoy your everyday job. Better developer experience overall. Cleaner structure and cleaner code. No magic, not so many conventions, no extra libraries needed, it is just simple, clean, and it works. Since signals were added, zonejs removed and SSR optimized 100, 100, 100 lighthouse page speeds out of the box.

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Homayoun Mohammadi

Which course do you recommend for learning angular?

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Alex • Edited

It's funny that I published an article yesterday with a very similar title and structure. Next.js is not the solution; node_modules bloating remains (Next.js carries around 1.5 millions LoC of dependencies, just checked), hydration issues are introduced, and the API mess continues.
Please check out my take on this; it's an introduction to the series. I am currently working on the more technical Part 2.

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Homayoun Mohammadi

Good luck

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Rense Bakker

There is no future 😆
We'll all get replaced with AI and AI will just randomly pick a framework based on nothing and build an app that looks like it's working, until people start actually using it. Which is not that much different from what we're already doing today. AI learned from the best afterall 😆

If people realize in time that AI is not intelligent at all, nextjs is a pretty good framework to build apps in. But I'm hoping we will see more SolidJS related frameworks in the future... Something that doesn't use webpack at least.

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Homayoun Mohammadi

I agree about ai and we will see more SolidJs

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KC

When it comes to building an enterprised-based SaaS or complex app, Next.js is still a preferred choice by majority. However, there are other alternatives which have much simpler configurations and faster compiling speed for building personal projects. I've tried Vite + React (TypeScript) and Astro. They are quite recommended.

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Homayoun Mohammadi

Yeah I test vite + react is very faster

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daniele

jQuery? Bootstrap? AngularJS?

A lot was done before React.

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Homayoun Mohammadi • Edited

Yeah but react is the most popular

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daniele

1- no it is not. w3techs.com/technologies/compariso...
2- If you're doing a historical summary, you can't skip key parts.
Maybe you were too young to know the whole story? Then you shouldn't tell the story.

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Neal Hayes

What we need is true simplicity again, pure and simple. Something that is simple and easy to use and yet ties everything together; the frontend and whatever you need backend. The frontend is still fairly simple, HTML and CSS. The backend is where you have a 1001 things going on and they all have to work together.

The backend is still much too complicated and there is no singular solution. What we need is a single simple base framework to handle all our backend needs and have modular components that seamlessly tie in when you need more functionality. There is a general understanding of how to write code we all should be following. I recently read something that sums it up pretty well, KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). That’s what we need for the backend, which as of yet we still don’t really have do we?

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Homayoun Mohammadi

The vanilla JS ist is too fast and it can handle most of task I think we should build some of our small or medium size Microservices with vanilla JS or using light weight tools to handle the complex task like routing

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Rong Sen Ng

Next.js is nothing without Vercel. So Next.js itself does not fix anything and it is not silver bullet and has its own set of limitations.

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George O. E. Campbell

you could run a next.js app on another cloud provider

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Homayoun Mohammadi

Yeah exactly also they push so much to use vercel

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Parag Nandy Roy

Next.js really changed the game...

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Homayoun Mohammadi

Yeah it's game changer but the problem is that when they released new update the previous code might broke

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Homayoun Mohammadi

What's is your experience with nextjs?

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h-weavium

Great stuff.
Good questions are asked, and gets amplified when keeping in mind Next.js is the coding agents' go-to.

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Nathan Tarbert

I’ve enjoyed all the research you’ve put into this story, it adds up

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Homayoun Mohammadi

Thank you bro , give me so much energy what do you like to cover next ?

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Emric Hollis

You're right, I’ve made the update. Thanks for pointing it out!

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Homayoun Mohammadi

Your welcome , I do because maybe after update somebody come and don't understand the comments and article fully

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Galactic Circuit

Wow this was an interesting one!

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Homayoun Mohammadi

I hope enjoyed, what tool would you like to cover next ?

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AbrahamDonald92

We want all three. But I think a new framework will emerge with more simplistic approach.