Frontend

My thoughts after several weeks of working with NextJS 14 / app dir / RSCs:

- bit of a learning curve (lots of stuff happens behind the scenes, eg there are various levels of caching on Vercel by default) 
- Jotai is much cleaner and easier than Redux
- deduped fetching in RSCs is awesome and much better than getStaticProps
- Suspense and loading states are great and make the app feel much more responsive
- Lots more files, since we now need to separate client & server components on a per-file basis (and use folder-based routing)
- Intercepting / parallel routes are neat

Overall, I'm a big fan and it seems like a large improvement over the previous paradigm

cma.xyz. Founder /paragraph, ceo /mirror, previously at Google & Coinbase 

Nice write up. I agree it’s an improvement and harder to grok. 

Server actions are also a nice DX improvement (automatic serialization and routing) for certain use cases. I wish one could invalidate/refresh an individual server component!

i build UIs, APIs & share useless facts at /randominsights | currently @paragraph ex: @pimlico, @gallery & rabbithole.gg - souravinsights.com

Yeah, if you are interacting with the API directly from the client, then there is no value add. If the API is permissioned (SQL, etc), then server actions which interact with it can be invoked with standard function calls from the client (api route and serialization are automatic).

I haven’t quite wrapped my head around server actions yet. I think our usecase isn’t the most compelling because we already have a fully fledged API outside of nextjs, so it seems like we wouldn’t reap much benefit from server actions.

Cc @sourav who was also exploring this earlier today