Starting with Next.js: How to build efficient, fast, and reactive web applications

Are you ready to take your web application development skills to the next level? Look no further than Next.js! This powerful JavaScript library helps you create modern, responsive, and dynamic websites that impress both users and search engines alike. In this article, we’ll walk through how to start using Next.js and build high-efficiency, fast, and reactionary web applications.

What is Next.js?

Next.js is a popular open-source JavaScript framework built on top of React, which is itself developed by Facebook. It helps developers build server-rendered and statically generated websites with minimal configuration required. With Next.js, you have access to features like automatic code splitting, optimized performance out of the box, built-in client-side routing, CSS-in-JS support, global CSS styles, error boundaries, SSR clientside rendering enhancements (such as fallbacks), dynamic imports/SSR improvements, data fetching optimizations, and more. All these benefits make Next.js a great choice for developing modern web applications quickly and easily.

Next.js is a React-based web framework that allows developers to build efficient, fast, and reactive web applications with ease. It provides an excellent developer experience, as it comes with many features out of the box, including server-side rendering, automatic code splitting, and easy deployment to popular hosting platforms like Vercel. In this blog post, we'll cover the basics of getting started with Next.js and show you how to build a simple web application.

Prerequisites

Before we get started, you'll need to have Node.js and npm installed on your computer. You can download the latest version of Node.js from the official website. Once you have Node.js installed, you can install the Next.js CLI by running the following command in your terminal:

npm install -g create-next-app

Creating a new Next.js app

To create a new Next.js app, we'll use the create-next-app command. This command creates a new Next.js app with all the necessary files and dependencies installed.

To create a new Next.js app, run the following command in your terminal:

npx create-next-app my-app

This will create a new folder called my-app in your current directory. Once the installation is complete, navigate to the my-app folder by running the following command:

cd my-app

Running the development server

Now that we have a new Next.js app set up, we can start the development server by running the following command:

npm run dev

This will start the Next.js development server, which will automatically reload the app whenever you make changes to the code. You can access the app by navigating to http://localhost:3000 in your browser.

Creating pages

In Next.js, each file in the pages directory is treated as a separate page. For example, if you create a file called pages/index.js, it will be treated as the homepage of your app.

Let's create a new page called about.js. To do this, create a new file called about.js in the pages directory and add the following code:

function About() {
  return <h1>About page</h1>
}

export default About

Now, if you navigate to http://localhost:3000/about, you should see the "About page" heading.

Adding styles

Next.js comes with built-in support for CSS modules, which allows you to write scoped CSS styles for your components.

To add styles to our About page, create a new file called about.module.css in the same directory as the about.js file, and add the following code:

.heading {
  font-size: 24px;
  font-weight: bold;
}

Now, update the About component to use the styles by importing the CSS module and adding the className attribute to the h1 element:

import styles from './about.module.css'

function About() {
  return <h1 className={styles.heading}>About page</h1>
}

export default About

Now, if you refresh the About page, you should see that the "About page" heading is styled with the CSS rules from the about.module.css file.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we covered the basics of getting started with Next.js. We created a new Next.js app, started the development server, created a new page, and added styles to it. Next.js makes it easy to build efficient, fast, and reactive web applications with React, and its built-in features like server-side rendering and automatic code splitting make it a great choice for building modern web applications.