Overview
muvees is a movie database application built for browsing films, viewing details, and discovering new movies to watch. It integrates with external movie APIs to provide comprehensive film information.
Why I Built This
I wanted to experiment with API integration and data fetching patterns in Next.js. This project served as a practical way to learn SWR for data fetching and explore building a polished UI around external data sources.
Key Features
Movie Discovery
Browse and search for movies with detailed information including synopsis, cast, and ratings.
Category Browsing
Explore movies organized by different categories and sections.
Responsive UI
Built with Chakra UI for a consistent, accessible interface across devices.
Build Notes
ISR Experimentation
This project was a testing ground for Next.js ISR (Incremental Static Regeneration). The question: when should you pre-render pages at build time versus fetching data client-side? For movie data that doesn’t change frequently, ISR with stale-while-revalidate caching headers gave the best balance — instant page loads from cache, with background updates when data changes.
Evolution
A long-running project that has evolved alongside my learning. The recent upgrade to Chakra UI v3 brought significant styling and theming improvements over v2.