How is Next.js unique compared to past frameworks and what makes it a durable technology for web development?

Good for the Firebase guys -- get that big tech company money. I think there were a couple emerging currents over the last ten years, which were cloud computing, AI and ML, the increase in the number of developers -- like coding becoming a thing everyone should be able to do -- then the emergence of mobile, and the no-code movement.

I would say Firebase fit into a really interesting window where you had programming becoming really popular among consumers and not in a boring “IT”/computer science sense, aligning with mobile technologies really manifesting and Facebook getting really popular. People started to look at technology as a cool thing to do, and consumer tech itself became accessible.

There was a period in the mid to late 2000s when people really thought the mobile web HTML-wise was going to become really popular, and HTML5 was the go-to term. That really fell short. Mobile wasn't really there. iOS development just continued exploding. Five years later, the seeds were planted for some of these front-end technologies and they just kept maturing. Not as quickly as people expected, since there were all these limitations -- like, the device APIs and access to JavaScript just weren't there, there were limits on memory, the client side couldn't store enough data and didn't have enough compute, Chrome wasn't really mature yet. But when those things started to come to light, I think that's when the JavaScript frameworks started to make more sense because the capacity of the browsers and whatnot was there. It took a while for the JavaScript APIs to mature and then actually become popularized. For such a long time, people were making websites while considering that there might be one or two percent of the users from IE7 or something. You had to think about these things. The convergence of browser compatibility, the maturing of browser APIs -- that kind of stuff I think is a really big deal that I didn't talk about at all.

All of that coming together created these new things that didn't exist before, one after another. The exciting thing about Meteor was that Websockets were not really popular for a while and were hard to implement, and they just made it easy. You also see huge funding rounds, which don't make that much sense, like Gatsby. Or a couple of these CMS services, like Prismic or Sanity. Because they're providing a resource that at some level is replacing a backend, they can charge stupid amounts of money for it. They probably have ginormous margins outside of marketing.

So, why is Next popular? Next is popular because React got popular. React got popular, but people couldn't index their websites, so Next solved the problem of React, being able to be rendered to create static websites. At the same time, Gatsby did that at some level, but performance-wise, Next is just way faster. Gatsby is super slow, especially when your websites get too big. I think Gatsby maybe popularized Jamstack as a term, the “m” being markup. Gatsby really took advantage of the patterns that were implemented by Jekyll and some of these other markup rendering things. But they used React, so people working on front-end applications could also have good content management processes and still use version control with GitHub for managing content.

That's another thing I didn't bring up. Version control through Git became popular over the last twenty years, and especially in the last ten years. Mercurial never really became as popularized. People were comfortable FTPing into their servers and just replacing codebases and whatnot for such a long time.

I mentioned cloud computing. For the end user, that means you can deploy your codebase in a pretty standard way. Tools like Heroku made that stupid easy. Netlify is an example of the early deploying of Jamstack tools. Vercel emerged and provided basically what is a commodity but made good UI/UX around it, understanding what the end user needs to do and making that very easy.

When you ask, “What's the next popular thing?” Back-end services like Firebase or Parse became really big, but I think their big picture was more around realtime web. If I understand it correctly, it was just very easy to make backends, not very high performing throughput backends. Firebase is still quite big, even though Google bought them. My interpretation is that Google bought Firebase because they saw a whole category of developers who would eventually become heavy cloud computing customers, but they would have to start somewhere, and the place they would start is key-value store databases, like Mongo-type interfaces.

All that aside, I think Next is popular today because React is popular. I think it's actually going to be popular for quite a while, as long as they keep innovating on build speed. For developers, the important things are build speed and ease of development environment, like not having huge version conflicts. If a lot of applications are written in React, it makes sense that you can share the components and the code between your static Next website as well as your more complicated JavaScript website. I'm not a genie, so I can't tell you what's going to be popular in the future. But I think within the realm of the things that are important, I think that's definitely there.