Building a Simple Ecommerce Application with NextUI
Streamlining Development with UI Libraries
Developing a project from idea to production can be overwhelming, especially without a dedicated team of developers. Fortunately, UI libraries provide pre-built sets of functions and components that can be added to and modified in an application, simplifying the development process.
Introducing NextUI
NextUI is a new UI library for React and Next.js that provides many reusable components, such as navbar, tooltip, tab, and pagination components. In this article, we’ll explore how to use NextUI to build a simple ecommerce application.
What is a UI Library?
A UI library is a collection of pre-built UI components and elements that can be integrated into a project and customized to facilitate product development. These UI components and elements usually include buttons, navbars, tooltips, and more.
Why NextUI?
NextUI is a beautifully designed UI framework with visually appealing component style defaults. It also has accessible components and follows WAI-ARIA standards, offering keyboard support and logical focus management. Additionally, NextUI is built on top of the CSS-in-JS library Stitches, allowing for customization of any component using the css prop, styled function, or native CSS selectors.
Setting Up Next.js and NextUI
To get started, we need to set up a Next.js app and install the NextUI package. Once installed, we need to set up the NextUIProvider at the root of our application.
Building Our Application
With NextUI installed and set up, we can start building our application. We’ll create a SiteHeader using the NextUI Navbar component and add a store-hero/banner to the homepage using the Container, Card, and Spacer components.
Adding a Store-Hero to the Homepage
We’ll add a store-hero/banner to the homepage, introducing us to the Container, Card, and Spacer components. We’ll use a Spacer with a y (vertical) value of 2 to give space between the SiteHeader and store-hero.
Fetching Product Data
We’ll fetch product data within getServerSideProps from a demo API and return the data as props. We’ll then render a list of products with titles, descriptions, and prices.
Creating the ProductCard Component
We’ll create a ProductCard component using the Card component and add an add-to-cart function using the Context API.
Global State Management Using Context API
We’ll set up global state management in Next.js using the Context API to manage the cart state.
Adding the Badge to Display the Number of Cart Items
We’ll add a Badge to display the number of cart items using the Badge component.
Creating the CartItem Component
We’ll create a CartItem component to display individual cart items and update the cart state.
Adding the Carts Page
We’ll create a Carts page to display the cart items and update the cart state.
Extending the Features of Our Ecommerce App
With the basics covered, we can extend the features of our ecommerce app and build out other applications using NextUI. Check out the official docs to learn more about NextUI and some great examples for React and Next.js.