You're reading from Real-World Next.js

Product typeBook

Published inFeb 2022

Reading LevelBeginner

PublisherPackt

ISBN-139781801073493

Edition1st Edition

Languages

Typescript

Tools

React

Concepts

Front End Web Development

Author (1)

Michele Riva

Chapter 2: Exploring Different Rendering Strategies

When talking about rendering strategies, we refer to how we serve a web page (or a web application) to a web browser. There are frameworks, such as Gatsby (as seen in the previous chapter), that are incredibly good at serving statically generated pages. Other frameworks will make it easy to create server-side rendered pages.

But Next.js brings those concepts to a whole new level, letting you decide which page should be rendered at build time and which should be served dynamically at runtime, regenerating the entire page for each request making certain parts of your applications incredibly dynamic. The framework also allows you to decide which components should exclusively be rendered on the client side, making your development experience extremely satisfying.

In this chapter, we'll have a closer look at:

How to dynamically render a page for each request using server-side rendering
Different ways to render certain...

Technical requirements

To run the code examples in this chapter, make sure you have Node.js and npm installed on your machine. As an alternative, you can use an online IDE such as https://repl.it or https://codesandbox.io.

You can find the code for this chapter in the GitHub repository: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Real-World-Next.js.

Server-side rendering (SSR)

Even though server-side rendering (SSR) sounds like a new term in the developer's vocabulary, it is actually the most common way for serving web pages. If you think of languages such as PHP, Ruby, or Python, they all render the HTML on the server before sending it to the browser, which will make the markup dynamic once all the JavaScript contents have been loaded.

Well, Next.js does the same thing by dynamically rendering an HTML page on the server for each request, then sending it to the web browser. The framework will also inject its own scripts to make the server-side rendered pages dynamic in a process called hydration.

Imagine you're building a blog and you want to display all the articles written by a specific author on a single page. This can be a great use case for SSR: a user wants to access this page, so the server renders it and sends the resulting HTML to the client. At this point, the browser will download all the scripts requested...

Client-side rendering (CSR)

As seen in the previous chapter, a standard React app is rendered once the JavaScript bundle has been transferred from the server to the client.

If you're familiar with create-react-app (CRA), you may have noticed that right before the web app renders, the whole web page is entirely white. That's because the server only serves a very basic HTML markup, which contains all the required scripts and styles to make our web app dynamic. Let's take a closer look at that HTML generated by CRA:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <link rel="icon" href="%PUBLIC_URL%/favicon.ico" />
    <meta
      name="viewport"
      content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"
    ...

Static site generation

So far, we've seen two different ways of rendering our web apps: on the client side and server side. Next.js gives us a third option called static site generation (SSG).

With SSG, we will be able to pre-render some specific pages (or even the whole website if necessary) at build time; that means that when we're building our web app, there might be some pages that won't change their content very often, so it makes sense for us to serve them as static assets. Next.js will render these pages during the build phase and will always serve that specific HTML that, just like SSR, will become interactive thanks to the React hydration process.

SSG brings a lot of advantages when compared to both CSR and SSR:

Easy to scale: Static pages are just HTML files that can be served and cached easily by any content delivery network (from now on, CDN). But even if you want to serve them using your own web server, it will result in a very low workload...

Summary

In this chapter, we've seen three different rendering strategies and why Next.js brings them to a whole new level with its hybrid rendering approach. We've also seen the benefits of these strategies, when we want to use them, and how they can affect the user experience or the server workload. We will always keep an eye on these rendering methodologies during the following chapters, adding more and more examples and use cases for each of them. They are the core concepts behind the choice of using Next.js as a framework.

In the next chapter, we're going to have a closer look at some of the most useful built-in Next.js components, its routing system, and how to manage metadata dynamically for improving both SEO and user experience.

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Published in: Feb 2022Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781801073493

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Author (1)

Michele Riva

Michele Riva is a passionate and experienced Software Engineer and Google Developer Expert from Milan, Italy. During the last years, he has contributed to many open-source projects from big companies and foundations, such as Facebook and Apache, in many different programming languages and paradigms, including Haskell, Erlang, Go, and JavaScript. He has also written dozens of public domain articles on different topics (software architecture, functional programming, performance enhancements, etc.) and gave many talks at conferences and meetups. He is currently working as a Senior Software Engineer in the architecture team at ViacomCBS, where he is building a multi-tenant Node.js application at the heart of their websites and streaming services.
Read more about Michele Riva

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