Boosting performance: Faire's transition to NextJS

At Faire, speed matters. Our product should be lightning fast so that our customers can achieve their goals quickly - whether that's setting up their shop in our marketplace, finding the products they're looking for, or something else.

In our original web application architecture, we kept things simple, serving our APIs and webpages in the same monolithic service. This meant we were writing HTML responses from a Kotlin server using a Mustache template, which featured our SPA (single page application) JavaScript bundle.

To render an SPA webpage, browsers need to sequentially: 1. Request the HTML, then parse the response. 2. Fetch the JavaScript bundle, then parse it, then execute it. 3. Fetch any view-specific data, then render the DOM. 4. Fetch any images present in the DOM.

Read at Medium