Static is the new dynamic

I recently tweeted (with some sarcastic humor) about server side rendering being re-discovered by the Javascript community. As someone who worked for many years in PHP and Java, server-side rendering and the ergonomics of making database calls in a page triggers feelings of a trip down memory lane.

As technology evolved and practices changed the idea of putting logic and database calls in your pages fell out of favor and many transitioned to new best practices that involved APIs and rendering static HTML wherever possible.

There were plenty of benefits to this, speed and simplicity being two of the major benefits. As statically generated sites based on React became the norm many people yearned for the same workflow but with all the power and flexibility of dynamic sites.

I have been following Next.js for quite some time and have been using it on some side projects. With the release of Next 9.3 I feel like the Next team has delivered a bit of a knockout punch. The framework now supports static rendering, server-side rendering, and client-side rendering with the same component ergonomics that all React developers are familiar with.

Static is the new dynamic - and Next.js is pushing the envelope of whats possible on the web. I can not wait for my next web project.