As were nearing the end of our first term of capstone, I’m able to look back and reflect on my team’s progress, including both our successes and challenges.
One of the particular things that I’ve had to begin learning for this project is the dev stack. In our project, we’re using React and NextJS for our full-stack application, which was completely new to me prior top this term. I come from a background of mostly PHP (particularly Laravel) and some ExpressJS, so it was definitely a challenge learning the new dev stack and applying the changes I want into the code with this minimal knowledge
In this post, I’ll be sharing some of the positive and negative things about React and NextJS coming from Laravel and my opinion on which option is better for development at the end of the post.
Benefits of React
Overall, I’ve found quite a few positive aspects of React. There are some quite obvious advantages that it has over other frameworks such as Laravel.
Performance
Overall, I’ve found that React is much better at performance than Laravel applications. React and NextJS have quite a few ways that they enable efficient performance on their sites, including a virtual DOM, server-side rendering, and automatic code-splitting.
Community/Support
I would definitely say the documentation and support is far superior with React and NextJS when compared to Laravel. With React and NextJS being a very popular in the web development community, there’s more than enough resources, guides, and packages available to make most applications you may want to create.
Disadvantages
While there are some obvious advantages to using React and NextJS, I would say there are a few things that I think are better in Laravel.
Difficult Learning Curve
When comparing the two, I think React and NextJS have a much steeper learning curve then Laravel does. I’ve been working on our capstone project throughout the term and find myself confused in a lot of different parts of React and NextJS. Meanwhile, I found the learning experience for Laravel was much smoother and easier to understand.
Dependence on external libraries
Another thing I think is worse in React compared to Laravel is the amount of additional libraries requried to serve your code. While Laravel has a lot of built-in functinalities, React more depends on using other libraries to perform basic tasks such as routing and state management.
Conclusion
Overall, there are some positive and negative aspects to using React and NextJS over Laravel. While it has much better performance and support, it’s much more difficult to learn and depends a lot on external libraries.
While I’m currently more comfortable with Laravel, I think that, as I progress, I’ll become more inclined to build my projects using React given the potential opportunities and performance improvements.
Leave a Reply