Today I decided to learn NextJS and managed to build a very basic Text-to-Base64 converter. You can find it at here.

I have been a die hard fan of Mithril, primarily because of its simplicity and that it gets my job done. I have considered moving to other frameworks such as Svelte, Nuxt and Preact. But they all have a little problem which made me ditch the entire thing: Svelte only responds on localhost:3000 and not http://localhost:3000 when running dev server, so I can see the page when using Firefox, but not LibreWolf (This is the most absurd one IMO). Preact's default project template looks confusing and scary as heck. And Nuxt is straight up hell from the beginning.

I also wanted to move from Mithril. It's a delightful framework to use, but it doesn't have any official boilerplate or a big community, and can be a hell to manage due to it being unopinionated.

After watching "I built 10 web apps... with 10 different languages" and see NextJS in action, I decided to choose it because I like its boilerplate. And oh boy, it doesn't disappoint me.

Its boilerplate is basic, so it doesn't look as intimidating as of Ruby on Rails or Nuxt, but also let me get straight to work. Its tutorials (from the official documentation) are straightforward, short and sweet, and I get things done very quick and easy. The routing system is based on files, so I don't have to do the routing by myself, which can be tedious and error-prone.

Handling input and output is a bit tricky. I wanted to have the output in a disabled <input> tag, so it took me a while to learn to handle input and figure out everything by myself.

Overall, NextJS is a delightful framework. Its boilerplate is simple but effective, and the tutorials are enjoyable and sweet. 9/10. Would recommend it to someone.

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