Next.js 15, Google Search Rolls Out AI to All, and SolidStart 1.0 Debuts

May 27, 2024

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Conference season is in full swing this week Vercel showed off the new goods they’ve got for developers to get excited about.

During Vercel Ship, the Next.js 15 RC (release candidate) was officially announced. Next.js 15 includes benefits like: support for React 19 and the React Compiler (Experimental), plus hydration error improvements. It also offers experimental support for partial pre-rendering, a new API to execute code after a response has finished streaming, and new config options for the App and Pages Router. But the biggest thing to note in this release is the change to caching: in Next 15, fetch requests, GET route handlers, and client navigation are no longer cached by default (a confusing default in Next.js, which caused a lot of confusion for devs why they were seeing the new data in local dev, but not in prod). Next has reversed course on this aggressive caching, and now requires teams that need it to opt in instead of having to opt out.

Not to be outdone, Google search rolled out AI overviews to all Chrome users with its latest browser update. While initial reviews of the AI’s accuracy and truthfulness are mixed, it’s a strong indicator that the AI hype train continues to go strong, and every major tech company must have an AI offering to compete. What’s less clear is how Google will monetize this offering, how SEO and website traffic will fare now that users may never need to leave the Google search engine to get the answers they seek, and if this will cause a decline in the amount of time and energy people put into writing articles and posting useful information if no one besides the LLM training models will consume it. It’s a brave new world we’re facing, and it will be interesting to see who survives and how it continues to evolve.

Last but not least, the team behind the popular JavaScript framework Solid.js debuts the meta framework SolidStart 1.0. The thinking behind SolidStart is that it integrates multiple separate packages to provide complete functionality, but each of these pieces can be replaced with a user’s own custom implementation if desired. Out of the box, SolidStart is built on Vinxi (a Vite + Nitro-based bundler and runtime), the Seroval serializer, and the Solid Router. It offers all the things we’ve come to expect from a good meta framework: file-based routing, streaming, server functions and actions, data pre-loading, API routes, and more, and it can be deployed on every platform that has a Nitro preset (25+ platforms and counting).

The Solid team has been good at reading the room: pioneering signals in 2019 and adding server functions in 2022, so there’s a good chance they’ll continue to make smart bets going forward, and we wish SolidStart the best of luck.

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