Blazity at Next.js Conf 2023 and what’s new in Next.js 14?
Next.js Conf holds particular significance for us, as it aligns perfectly with our commitment to staying at the forefront of technological advancements in the Next.js ecosystem. Here’s a summary of the most notable announcements from this year’s edition.
This year we had been invited to join the official NextConf watch party in London.
Our founding partner, Jakub Czapski, joined an expert panel focused on highlighting the importance of frontend technologies, especially Next.js in shaping the user experience for generative AI companies.
Together with leaders from WPP and Vercel, Jakub explored the unique set of challenges faced by AI companies and the critical role Next.js and headless architecture play in solving them.
The Next.js Conf 2023 was marked by several notable announcements, the most important one being the release of Next.js 14. The Vercel team emphasized that this release was focused on enhancing the performance, stability, and developer experience of the framework rather than creating new APIs.
Here are some of the most notable changes:
Partial Static Prerendering
One of the most noteworthy features is the partial (static) pre-rendering.
The Vercel team wanted Next.js to offer the speed and reliability of static, while also supporting fully dynamic, personalized responses.
It allows developers to render the Suspense fallback during the build and stream the children components after they finish processing. The streaming happens in the context of the initial request, so there’s no additional network overhead. For users, it means seeing the placeholder faster.
Partial prerendering is built on React Suspense and requires no new APIs to learn. It allows for a significant improvement in initial visual loading by rendering placeholders from a static cache, including Suspense fallbacks.
Partial prerendering is still under active development and the Vercel team will be sharing more updates in an upcoming minor release.
Server Actions
As of v14, Next.js has upgraded to the latest React canary, which includes stable Server Actions.
Server Actions allow you to use server-side code inside your components in a secure way. You can declare such Actions inside React components or completely outside of it.
It might be easier for developers to think about this as “portable API Routes”. Instead of creating a new file in the api directory, you can quickly declare one function in the context of the feature you’re working on. It also has a built-in support for handling forms.
Turbopack
The Next.js team has been working on the faster Rust-made replacement for Webpack for some months now and they plan to release it as Stable soon. The team will still support Webpack and custom integrations.
Turbopack is still in development but the Vercel team already demonstrated some very promising results, with up to 53.3% faster local server startup and up to 94% faster code updates with Fast Refresh.
Anyone interested in the development of Turbopack can follow the percentage of tests passing at areweturboyet.com
Learn Next.js
Vercel team also released a brand new, free course on Next.js Learn. This free interactive course is designed to help developers learn the main features of Next.js by building a full-stack web application.
It’s divided into 16 chapters that take users from React to Next.js.including topics such as Static and Dynamic Rendering, App Router, authentication, databases, and more.
This course assumes the participants have a basic understanding of React and JavaScript. But for those who are also new to React Vercel team prepared a React Foundations course to help learn the fundamentals of React, such as components, props, state, and hooks, and newer features like Server Components and Suspense.
We believe that this course will help many people to start with Next.js most efficiently and we strongly encourage everyone, beginner or experienced, to check it out.
Just like in previous years, Next.js Conf 2023 was a great event. The conference proves to be the most prominent event for the entire Next.js community, bringing together developers and business leaders pushing the entire ecosystem forward.
We’re delighted that we could be part of it and we’d like to thank the Vercel team for organizing this great event! We can’t wait for next year's edition.
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