Why I'm Using Express Instead of NextJS

NextJS is a full-stack framework. True! Its API routes are convenient and scale well. Also true! Why am I still using ExpressJS instead?

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[joshtriedcoding]

Was aware you could self-host NextJS, what I didn't know is that it would just act like a regular nodejs server then. Thanks for sharing, you learn something new every day

[codinginflow]

I recently ran a poll on the NextJS Subreddit and the majority of people were using a separate server. One big reason there was simple separation of concerns.

[amershboul]

i start watching your videos recently and they are very useful, keep going we support you👏

[Tszyu]

In actual production you would almost always have dedicated api services via express, spring, .NET, etc that are vertically or horizontally scaled, fronted by api gateways and waf, distributed and or edge cacheing, observable via open telemetry and application logging, alerts via pager duty.This concept of having production grade APIs within SSR ui frameworks is a concept pushed by cloud providers like vercel that maintain these frameworks to have you put everything into cloud functions. Just because you can put an api into a ssr framework doesn’t mean you should.

[mcgruff]

I would like to point out that you can still use Nextjs and express together. Yes Nextjs is a full stack framework but that doesn’t mean you can’t use both here(unless you don’t have a front end). Virtually you would be running react but now you still get all the file base routing system, hosting ……etc you’ll just hit the express backend routes instead of the server less routes problem solved. Hell you could even use a hybrid approach and use Nextjs for all of your light request and express for your heavy request.

[owenwexler]

I’m using NextJS for the frontend with an Express backend and two Express microservices but using the NextJS routes as a proxy to the backend services so I can hide API keys in server-side environment variables. I am going to have a mobile app hitting the backend too so definitely can’t have the backend and web frontend on one server for that.

[ozzyfromspace]

I had this exact issue of stateless function calls while working on a dashboard for a startup as a contractor. I ultimately deployed a standalone go server, same difference. Nice video!

[WebDevCody]

Could you clarify for me, you needed a stateful deployment because you’re running replicate on the machine itself, or are you just interacting with the replicate api which is taking too long?

[timesizes]

In my opinion and like you mentioned in video you have to use whats best for the current project or what the client requests 😅. For my current project some sort of portfolio combined with booking or request system for photographer i started to use api routes. For my last project I had to use Spring boot due to legacy system restrictions. Honstly a simple express server would be more and sufficient and for my upcoming project i will use nestjs. So you see its important to stay open and learn new frameworks and not restrict to one technology. Altough nestjs is a good fullstack framework its not the tool for all use cases. Same goes for other tools like express, angular and so on. If you are familiar with the basic concepts you wont have much problems to switch and learn new things. At the end these are just tools you have to pick the best/most suited for the current project. Thats the point which seperates "good" from "bad" developer. The ability to stay flexible, learn new cocepts and adopt the concepts if nessecary

[tommoore]

I'm coming to a similar point of realisation now as I want to integrate GPT-4 into my app at some point in the future. I've got two possible solutions:

1. Using Next api routes for requests that you know will be quick and an express server for requests that will take a while.
2. If the slow request is done based on a user input (like requesting to generate a blog) then why not fetch on the frontend, that doesn't have a timeout limit?

[tamalefrank]

I can definitely relate to this, down here in Africa where the internet is quite slow in so many places, building a fully NextJS powered ecommerce website may not be user-friendly. The servers usually time out before all the information is retrieved for the user..

[antoniocestari]

Well the first 2:

- Timeout: I think most serverless funct providers limits this. The time is higher if you pay more. I'm not saying that this vercel time is good, just that is a common concern if you plan to use serverless anyway and it depends on your code exec time.

- The industry is using a lot of REST and that's supposed to be stateless. It's also a known limitation of serverless but it's great for REST

Now for the third one, cold starts. If you have a server that gets a request every hour you won't probably want to pay the whole hour for that, so you'll probably choose a cheap plan and those could include cold starts as well. So it's basically a providers/money thing

[goldenknowledge]

Josh this is a really good explanation 👏

[jamescbender]

The bigger issue for me is that I need to treat the back end and front end differently. I need to scale them differently, my clients need to deploy them to different logical zones, and I need to have different security policies for the front end and back end. I'll use the Next routes for "locally convenient" things for my application, but most of the functionality must be separate.

[aaaronme]

I am using AWS for websockets, works really well, data which I need to keep like connections etc is just store with a TTL in dynamodb

[LearningwithJS-eici]

No web sockets so that’s the reason I can’t send a blob url from a audio input to the api in nextjs and try to read/convert it to a file to send it

[leroypowell-louis]

Nextjs doesn’t allow you get images uploaded to the public directory after running next build. I learnt this the hard way after building an e-commerce application that required new product image uploads. I later had to completely delete the api routes and moved the entire database to an express server and that worked superbly through api calls in the next is app, all newly uploaded images didn’t get 404 errors when being fetched.

[owl]

Hey Josh! Could you explain in a Video what kind of Stack you will use then primary? Because React doenst give any official stuff anymore for stand alone if i understand right?

[abhisycvirat]

If we use express, should we go with pages routes or app router? Does it even matter?

[mrfran]

But shouldn’t NextJS be agnostic of what type of backend infra are you using? Like you could dockerize the NextJS app and deploy to something else different than Vercel/AWS?