I'm currently investigating the feasibility of using Next.js for a major refactor of our service and the one thing that stands out to me is how fractured the Next ecosystem is. More than 6 months after the App router was introduced the most important libraries are still in beta and don't have conclusive documentation for integrating with App dir.
For my projects localisation is a necessity. I tried both i18n and next-intl and found them both lacking in functionality, buggy and missing documentation. This should just be part of the framework or at least have a tighter integration.
The same story with next-auth.js, which confusingly still exists while promoting https://authjs.dev/. For the most basic implementation it probably works, but the app router documentation is spliced into the normal documentation which creates a whole lot of ambiguity.
There's been a lot of discussion surrounding caching for Next.js 13 as well. I personally find it confusing and the behaviour described in the documentation regarding revalidateTag/revalidatePath and client-side caching does not match my real world experience. I would love some more documentation regarding user-specific caching as well, for instance with personalised user dashboards.
It feels a bit ridiculous to release Next.js 14 today as we're still getting used to Next.js 13. And though there might not be any big/breaking changes it creates a feeling where Vercel is racing forward without keeping other library maintainers or its users in mind.
You can continue to use the Pages Router until there's broader ecosystem support for the larger React changes like Server Components. You don't need to use a library to handle localization or i18n.
i18n was part of the framework in the Pages Router, but it was limiting. We heard a lot of feedback that folks wanted better access to the raw primitives versus an opinionated i18n setup. So now you have full flexibility when using Middleware https://nextjs.org/docs/app/building-your-application/routin....
NextAuth.js just released a new beta version with full support for all App Router features, including Server Actions. It's what we're using in the official Next.js Learn course that teaches authentication https://nextjs.org/learn.
We mentioned this in the keynote today at Next.js Conf, but it wasnt in the Next.js 14 post, but next we're working on simplifying caching. We do now have extensive documentation on caching, but it kind of highlights that it's a bit much right now https://nextjs.org/docs/app/building-your-application/cachin....
Next.js 14 doesn't have new APIs to learn, so if you're learning Next.js 13 (which I believe you're referring to the App Router model), nothing changes. The major version is for semver, because there's a few small breaking changes like bumping the Node.js minimum version. We have some codemods https://nextjs.org/docs/app/building-your-application/upgrad....
I'm part of the team from inlang, we are developing solutions to make i18n both easier and more efficiently (e.g. with a web editor, vscode extension and CLI to automate your workflows). Our ecosystem is agnostic to every stack which means it can be integrated with every tech-stack out. We even have our own i18n library called paraglideJS.
For my projects localisation is a necessity. I tried both i18n and next-intl and found them both lacking in functionality, buggy and missing documentation. This should just be part of the framework or at least have a tighter integration.
The same story with next-auth.js, which confusingly still exists while promoting https://authjs.dev/. For the most basic implementation it probably works, but the app router documentation is spliced into the normal documentation which creates a whole lot of ambiguity.
There's been a lot of discussion surrounding caching for Next.js 13 as well. I personally find it confusing and the behaviour described in the documentation regarding revalidateTag/revalidatePath and client-side caching does not match my real world experience. I would love some more documentation regarding user-specific caching as well, for instance with personalised user dashboards.
It feels a bit ridiculous to release Next.js 14 today as we're still getting used to Next.js 13. And though there might not be any big/breaking changes it creates a feeling where Vercel is racing forward without keeping other library maintainers or its users in mind.