What is Nuxt.js?

The first question always is what is nextjs? And just in case, I also want to answer what is Vue.js. Though you should really know this and if you don't, make sure you take some course that also teaches you that because this course builds up on this knowledge. But to make sure we're all on the same page, Vue.js is a front end JavaScript framework that allows us to build powerful and engaging UIs in the browser, so to say it runs in the browser. Since JavaScript runs there and with Vue.js we can build user interfaces of any complexity and it does a lot of the heavy lifting we normally have to do when working with JavaScript. It's a mixture of Angular and react. You could say especially Angular one, you see a lot of syntaxes and features in Vue that you know from these frameworks and libraries and you can build both UI widgets as well as more complex single page applications. With Vue, it's also a real complete framework. It also offers solutions for routing, so handling different URLs and for state management, and it's also very lightweight, making it extremely popular. You get a rich ecosystem and everyone loves Vue.js. Now Next.js builds up on Vue.js. It's not a new framework and it's also not adding a lot to the code base of Vue.js. Instead, it's all about making the development of Vue.js applications easier. And with that I don't just mean the steps, but also the application that comes out that it's highly optimized, things like that. One of its core features is that it makes server side rendering a breeze. We talk about universal apps when we talk about server side rendering, and this essentially means that we can build a Vue application where we pre render the view the page the user is going to see on the server right before serving it to the user. This has great effects on search engine optimization and can speed up your page. More on that in a second. Another core feature Next.js introduces is its configuration by file and folder structure approach. You rarely work in configuration files. For example, when setting up routes, you don't write JavaScript code to do so. Instead, you create a folder structure that represents your page, and the routes you need are automatically inferred from that, and that pattern is used a lot in next applications. And of course you will learn all about this in this course. Now finally we can say it really simplifies the development of apps. It makes it easier. It has many smart approaches that make it more fun and all of that without adding much overhead to the bundle you're shipping. So your apps are going to stay extremely fast and might even be faster due to all the optimizations it puts into place.