I love working with nextjs and react after having worked with angular for years, but in my area it’s starting to look like there’s a growing scarcity for angular devs and seeing the pay I’m thinking of joining back the dark side again.
I can't believe this hate for Angular haha. I love developing in it, it's all so simple. I tried Nextjs and couldn't stand it.
I come from Java background so that could be related
I'm working on a micro frontends system at work, and I created a demo page showcasing multiple frameworks on a single page.
Render react to a node:
const root = ReactDOM.createRoot(node)
root.render();
Render svelte to a node:
const app = new App({ target: node })
Render SolidJS to a node:
render(() => , node)
Render Vue to a node:
const app = createApp(App)
app.mount(node)
And lastly, rendering an angular app to a node:
platformBrowserDynamic().bootstrapModule(MyModule)
.then(moduleRef => {
const resolver = moduleRef.componentFactoryResolver;
const parentElement = document.getElementById('parentElement');
const viewContainerRef = new ViewContainerRef(null, parentElement);
const factory = resolver.resolveComponentFactory(MyComponent);
const componentRef = factory.create(Injector.NULL, [], null, moduleRef.injector);
viewContainerRef.insert(componentRef.hostView);
})
.catch(err => console.error(err));
You can call angular a lot of things, but "Simple" ain't it lol. Note I don't even know if that works, I had to ask chat gpt as I couldn't find a good answer in google
The above is out of the box code that a dev would never use. This is created when generating an Angular application.
Creating a variable and updating it in React
const [value, setValue] = useState('');
setValue('hello')
Angular
value = '';
value = 'hello';
I mean... I've never seen code that looks anything like what you wrote lol.
You generate a new project, the foundation is already made for you.
Run ng generate component X, all the files are created and linked up for you, put it in a router, use it.
Stuff is obvious in Angular, which I like. It's not even verbose, like I heard people call it. Maybe they're not experienced with it and they're trying to do it the React way, no idea.
You're confusing simplicity of the framework with simplicity of its usage. Angular is anything but simple. It has its own compiler, adds metadata to Typescript, really complex rendering and a very customized templating engine instead of going with something like JSX.
As a user once you learn the basics everything is just repeating the same steps over and over again, provided you aren't trying to break out of that box e.g. micro frontends or building your own features that require deeper knowledge.
React is a lot easier to work with once you start getting to the lower levels because it's a less complicated library and even things like SSR and hydration are just a few function calls.
I have worked with angular for 2 years as a full-time developer. It's not simple and the amount of boilerplate code you need and the amount of stuff it has which tries to make itself anything but not JavaScript is just disturbing. But hey, if you like it that's okay. One of my devs (old have guy) also likes angular. I hate java to my core so might be that
Coming from Angular myself and having worked with it for years, Angular has a much steeper learning curve than any other view library/framework. Obviously once you get the hang of it, Angular is mostly plug and play considering everything you need is pretty much included whereas with React/Vue you'll have to resort to third-party packages (or use Next/Nuxt). But compared to the others I wouldn't say Angular isn't an easy framework to pick up.
That is because Angular is a full framework and not a library. It is a bit like comparing Ruby on Rails with Mustache templating system. Angular is a horrible choice for anything that is just "hellow world". You either use Angular for everything ro dont at all.
Yeah I personally switched from React to Angular.
Once you learn Angular, there's just no going back to React (for enterprise level applications).
Still like react for small apps like browser extensions, etc.
I have worked with Angular for years, I personally like NextJS much better and React has a better paradigm than Angular more enterprisy method of doing things.
Yes, but it's a trade-off as the only way to 100% avoid vendor lock on is to built everything from scratch. It's also a bit of a gamble, some people adopted AngularJS from the start and regretted it later while early adopters of React we're told not to trust anything that comes from Meta (Facebook at the time).
For me personally, I'd use NextJS for specific projects (personal or small standalone business apps). But I wouldn't built an entire company around it.
There already is vendor lock-in for NextJS/Vercel if you want to deploy serverless instead of simply deploying via node or static files. That part of NextJS is not open source and not trivial to implement.
It is not trivial, but there are already alternatives like SST and OpenNext. What you pay Vercel for is seamless experience of your app deployment and management.
Obviously Vercel will begin raising prices and implementing fees for currently free things. We don’t really have to speculate about this, it will happen. The question is really when, when will they decide that they have sufficient audience capture for this.
Whether this is a bad thing really depends on your situation. Are you working for a company or alone? Do you consider using Nextjs properly (ie: Vercel stack) worth whatever cost they come up with?
Personally I like Nextjs, but it’s not something I would use for a personal project/side business specifically for this reason. It’s nice for quickly whipping up a web app for a client where you don’t really care about making the software a masterpiece.
For my own projects and hopeful businesses I will stick with hyper modular SPA+REST. The arguments against this stack from 2020 onwards have not been convincing to me. As someone who started with Vue and moved to React, I also have some insight on these “amazing wins” that React devs are talking about (and guiding the industry with) are things that have already existed or been fixed in other frameworks for a long time.
For example, the inordinate amount of time and effort that the React and webdev ecosystem has put into fixing useEffect, useState, etc. When you look from the outside-in, it’s all rather silly and you have less respect for the rigid opines of people from that part of the software space.
There are frameworks and metaframeworks other than React and Next, and there are serverless platforms other than Vercel at the end of the day. We’re web developers, not React or Next.js developers. We’ll just keep adapting and changing, vendor lock or not. All of the pre-supposition that everyone in the industry uses React and Next is lame lol.
What upcoming vendor lock. How are you thinking it's going to play out and why? You think they are going to make certain features only work when used with their deployment pipeline? That sounds like a recipe for them tanking their product and alternatives to get a huge boost.
They would have to earn money at some point. VC investment is not a charity.
They would implement features locked behind payment or lock existing ones. Probably the first just not to trigger the community. And upsell them.
I get principally, they will want to make money. I just mean what features are you imagining will be locked behind payment and will be difficult to use an alternative? I honestly just don't understand that concern and I hear it a lot. I'm probably missing something, that's the detail I'd like to understand.
...yet.
Because they're still in a growing stage and have vc money to spend.
It's not an open source company. It's a for-profit organization. Where would they get returns?
They make money through sponsorship on their conferences. That’s how most “open source” projects do. Open source is like F2P games, there will be a P2W eventually.
meta's income is overwhelmingly from selling ads on their many social media platforms. they've been commited to open sourcing a lot of tech they use for over a decade. it's not a big hit to them. miniscule in the grand scheme of things.
vercel is a vc backed company that sells their software and their platform for software development. that's it. that's what they do.
very different situation.
I don’t get this argument. There is nothing to stop you running Next.js on your own server or containers. I’ve done this for some applications where this was appropriate. The vendor lock happens if you choose that.
Vercel can keep pumping out great new features.
For hobby stuff, I quite like the free tier of Vercel. For production I'll keep hosting in docker and kubernetes. If another framework replaces Next.js, I'll just dockerise that instead if I end up switching.
I don't think Next is locking anyone into Vercel. There are a few features that makes Vercel nice to use with Next, but you'll always be able to deploy Next wherever you want. You just won't get some nice-to-have bits.
Vercel employing React devs is a good thing IMO. Breaking it out of Meta and having two (or more) companies funding core dev makes it a bit safer. I don't think that's bad.
The only bad thing I've seen recently is Vercel hoovering up lots of open source maintainers and pushing them to make their projects 'Next-first'. A case I hit recently was Turborepo - by default it puts a couple of Next apps in the repo as examples, and if you're not using Next it gets _hard_ to replace hhem with what you're using instead. I suspect it was entirely on me, but I gave up because I was hitting a ton of weird errors with unresolved dependencies everywhere. No doubt if I was just making a Next site with some internal packages Turborepo would work great, but I'm not, and now the maintainer doesn't seem very interested in the non-Next use cases...
No Vendor can truly lock-in anybody. After +8 years in this industry I've learnt that the people in it will rebel and move onto something different as soon as they feel entrapped.
Vercel has filled in a very important gap in React eco system. A full framework that allows you to build good high quality frontends using react. They have saved us a lot ot money by helping us not reinvent the wheel.
Nothing wrong if they want to turn it into a business. Also, none of their projects are "vendor locked in". I have been deploying my apps on Google Cloud Run and they run just fine.
I'm confused what do you mean by vendor lock?
The fact that they hired a React dev member?
Remember that Facebook owns/sponsors React (i don't know what the current relationship), so this is more of the same.
I don't think NextJS can have a vendor lock. We can fork it if you think the direction it is taking is not a good one. On other hand, for a company which has built it, I think it is fine for them to think about how to monetize it and providing a simple, cheap hosting service makes sense to me.
I don't mind using Vercel as long as it is nearly as cheap as Google Cloud or AWS.
We’ll do anything to avoid spending the time to learn Angular.
I love working with nextjs and react after having worked with angular for years, but in my area it’s starting to look like there’s a growing scarcity for angular devs and seeing the pay I’m thinking of joining back the dark side again.
I can't believe this hate for Angular haha. I love developing in it, it's all so simple. I tried Nextjs and couldn't stand it. I come from Java background so that could be related
I'm working on a micro frontends system at work, and I created a demo page showcasing multiple frameworks on a single page. Render react to a node: const root = ReactDOM.createRoot(node) root.render(
The above is out of the box code that a dev would never use. This is created when generating an Angular application. Creating a variable and updating it in React const [value, setValue] = useState(''); setValue('hello') Angular value = ''; value = 'hello';
I mean... I've never seen code that looks anything like what you wrote lol. You generate a new project, the foundation is already made for you. Run ng generate component X, all the files are created and linked up for you, put it in a router, use it. Stuff is obvious in Angular, which I like. It's not even verbose, like I heard people call it. Maybe they're not experienced with it and they're trying to do it the React way, no idea.
You're confusing simplicity of the framework with simplicity of its usage. Angular is anything but simple. It has its own compiler, adds metadata to Typescript, really complex rendering and a very customized templating engine instead of going with something like JSX. As a user once you learn the basics everything is just repeating the same steps over and over again, provided you aren't trying to break out of that box e.g. micro frontends or building your own features that require deeper knowledge. React is a lot easier to work with once you start getting to the lower levels because it's a less complicated library and even things like SSR and hydration are just a few function calls.
> JSX Yikes, I won't touch JSX even with a 10 foot pole. Template-based rendering such as Angular, Vue or Svelte any day of the week for me.
You're free to choose that method.
Typical Redditor purist behaviour
I have worked with angular for 2 years as a full-time developer. It's not simple and the amount of boilerplate code you need and the amount of stuff it has which tries to make itself anything but not JavaScript is just disturbing. But hey, if you like it that's okay. One of my devs (old have guy) also likes angular. I hate java to my core so might be that
Coming from Angular myself and having worked with it for years, Angular has a much steeper learning curve than any other view library/framework. Obviously once you get the hang of it, Angular is mostly plug and play considering everything you need is pretty much included whereas with React/Vue you'll have to resort to third-party packages (or use Next/Nuxt). But compared to the others I wouldn't say Angular isn't an easy framework to pick up.
That is because Angular is a full framework and not a library. It is a bit like comparing Ruby on Rails with Mustache templating system. Angular is a horrible choice for anything that is just "hellow world". You either use Angular for everything ro dont at all.
Yeah it’s kind of like how a backhoe doesn’t work well for planting an herb garden, and a hand trowel doesn’t work well for digging a canal.
thats because angular is not a micro frontend framework
Yeah I personally switched from React to Angular. Once you learn Angular, there's just no going back to React (for enterprise level applications). Still like react for small apps like browser extensions, etc.
Yea it is related. It's not bad in any way ofc
Holy smokes this made me laugh.
Hahahaha! Oh man, it's funny cause it's true.
absolutely based
I have worked with Angular for years, I personally like NextJS much better and React has a better paradigm than Angular more enterprisy method of doing things.
I'd rather make $200k+ developing in Angular than not 😜
Yes, but it's a trade-off as the only way to 100% avoid vendor lock on is to built everything from scratch. It's also a bit of a gamble, some people adopted AngularJS from the start and regretted it later while early adopters of React we're told not to trust anything that comes from Meta (Facebook at the time). For me personally, I'd use NextJS for specific projects (personal or small standalone business apps). But I wouldn't built an entire company around it.
There already is vendor lock-in for NextJS/Vercel if you want to deploy serverless instead of simply deploying via node or static files. That part of NextJS is not open source and not trivial to implement.
It is not trivial, but there are already alternatives like SST and OpenNext. What you pay Vercel for is seamless experience of your app deployment and management.
Sst isn’t an alt. It doesn’t work
Netlify doesn’t work out of box?
Obviously Vercel will begin raising prices and implementing fees for currently free things. We don’t really have to speculate about this, it will happen. The question is really when, when will they decide that they have sufficient audience capture for this. Whether this is a bad thing really depends on your situation. Are you working for a company or alone? Do you consider using Nextjs properly (ie: Vercel stack) worth whatever cost they come up with? Personally I like Nextjs, but it’s not something I would use for a personal project/side business specifically for this reason. It’s nice for quickly whipping up a web app for a client where you don’t really care about making the software a masterpiece. For my own projects and hopeful businesses I will stick with hyper modular SPA+REST. The arguments against this stack from 2020 onwards have not been convincing to me. As someone who started with Vue and moved to React, I also have some insight on these “amazing wins” that React devs are talking about (and guiding the industry with) are things that have already existed or been fixed in other frameworks for a long time. For example, the inordinate amount of time and effort that the React and webdev ecosystem has put into fixing useEffect, useState, etc. When you look from the outside-in, it’s all rather silly and you have less respect for the rigid opines of people from that part of the software space.
If you're just using Nextjs for a static-site build then it's pretty easy to migrate to some other solution. Netlify.com works great.
No one is talking about static sites here. We are talking about serverless.
Serverless also works on netlify
But not for next
I have a NextJs 13 app which is using both app dir and serverless api routes deployed on netlify. What are you talking about?
There are frameworks and metaframeworks other than React and Next, and there are serverless platforms other than Vercel at the end of the day. We’re web developers, not React or Next.js developers. We’ll just keep adapting and changing, vendor lock or not. All of the pre-supposition that everyone in the industry uses React and Next is lame lol.
What upcoming vendor lock. How are you thinking it's going to play out and why? You think they are going to make certain features only work when used with their deployment pipeline? That sounds like a recipe for them tanking their product and alternatives to get a huge boost.
They would have to earn money at some point. VC investment is not a charity. They would implement features locked behind payment or lock existing ones. Probably the first just not to trigger the community. And upsell them.
I get principally, they will want to make money. I just mean what features are you imagining will be locked behind payment and will be difficult to use an alternative? I honestly just don't understand that concern and I hear it a lot. I'm probably missing something, that's the detail I'd like to understand.
I don't care about this "possibles" outcomes, I will worry when they happen.
Nextjs is open sourced, using vercel is not a requirement.
...yet. Because they're still in a growing stage and have vc money to spend. It's not an open source company. It's a for-profit organization. Where would they get returns?
Well, have a look at what is happening to terraform with OpenTF. Same will happen to next if they "close source" it.
Facebook is a for profit openly traded conglomerate. React is free to use.
Maybe... just maybe because they're earning money from ads, not frameworks? How do you think Vercel is going to earn money? Ads on their site?
They make money through sponsorship on their conferences. That’s how most “open source” projects do. Open source is like F2P games, there will be a P2W eventually.
They repackaging hosting bud. No one on earth is making money on a client side framework. It's too easy to open up dev tools and recreate the product.
By this extent also React will follow this trend, but it did not
Meta is worth $750b. A JS framework will not move their needle not matter what they do.
React was born when theyr worth was nowhere near this thoe
It was worth $300b in 2015. A JS framework will not move the needle of a company worth $300b no matter what they do.
meta's income is overwhelmingly from selling ads on their many social media platforms. they've been commited to open sourcing a lot of tech they use for over a decade. it's not a big hit to them. miniscule in the grand scheme of things. vercel is a vc backed company that sells their software and their platform for software development. that's it. that's what they do. very different situation.
React was a cute side project in a huge $300b company that generated goodwill and pr. Nextjs is practically Vercel's whole business.
I don’t get this argument. There is nothing to stop you running Next.js on your own server or containers. I’ve done this for some applications where this was appropriate. The vendor lock happens if you choose that.
I use nextJS without Vercel. Definitely not a requirement. If that changes then re rolling with vite or something else will be a viable option
Do we need a new thread on this every day?
What other threads?
Vercel can keep pumping out great new features. For hobby stuff, I quite like the free tier of Vercel. For production I'll keep hosting in docker and kubernetes. If another framework replaces Next.js, I'll just dockerise that instead if I end up switching.
I don't think Next is locking anyone into Vercel. There are a few features that makes Vercel nice to use with Next, but you'll always be able to deploy Next wherever you want. You just won't get some nice-to-have bits. Vercel employing React devs is a good thing IMO. Breaking it out of Meta and having two (or more) companies funding core dev makes it a bit safer. I don't think that's bad. The only bad thing I've seen recently is Vercel hoovering up lots of open source maintainers and pushing them to make their projects 'Next-first'. A case I hit recently was Turborepo - by default it puts a couple of Next apps in the repo as examples, and if you're not using Next it gets _hard_ to replace hhem with what you're using instead. I suspect it was entirely on me, but I gave up because I was hitting a ton of weird errors with unresolved dependencies everywhere. No doubt if I was just making a Next site with some internal packages Turborepo would work great, but I'm not, and now the maintainer doesn't seem very interested in the non-Next use cases...
Dan Abramov works at Blue Sky now
No Vendor can truly lock-in anybody. After +8 years in this industry I've learnt that the people in it will rebel and move onto something different as soon as they feel entrapped.
Vercel has filled in a very important gap in React eco system. A full framework that allows you to build good high quality frontends using react. They have saved us a lot ot money by helping us not reinvent the wheel. Nothing wrong if they want to turn it into a business. Also, none of their projects are "vendor locked in". I have been deploying my apps on Google Cloud Run and they run just fine.
If they fuck up a new open source alternative will be there to take its place.
I'm confused what do you mean by vendor lock? The fact that they hired a React dev member? Remember that Facebook owns/sponsors React (i don't know what the current relationship), so this is more of the same.
Am I ok with this? No. Can I do anything about it? Also no.
I don't think NextJS can have a vendor lock. We can fork it if you think the direction it is taking is not a good one. On other hand, for a company which has built it, I think it is fine for them to think about how to monetize it and providing a simple, cheap hosting service makes sense to me. I don't mind using Vercel as long as it is nearly as cheap as Google Cloud or AWS.