There are similarities to PHP – and I think that's a great thing! I like to think of Next.js as the best parts of PHP / Rails with the powerful UI engine of React. Especially with the new App Router, where you can fetch code inside components like `await db.query()` and soon easily insert/update/delete from the same file as well.
that's one thing I've been thinking about a lot lately and I think it is confusing for many - that both Next/Nuxt/Remix and Rails have a title of a "full stack" framework while they are pretty different in reality.
Next/Nuxt are coming from the frontend origins and are strongest there, while Rails/Django are coming from the backend and focus on db ORM / data model story via ActiveRecord etc.
I understand the etymology of terminology, but I think we'll probably come up with better names in the future. E.g. Remix briefly called themselves "center-stack" which I found interesting and think makes sense.
I'll keep investigating and probably whip up a blog post about it.
I enjoy interviewing people who have full-stack engineer on their resume, as it means I can ask them about anything from HTML tags to CPU microcode, or from relational algebra to networking stacks, and they'll be able to give a good answer.
https://beta.nextjs.org/docs/data-fetching/fundamentals