Creating a tRPC API Route
Ok So first - what is tRPC and what problem does it solve about NextJS. As per the website
tRPC allows you to easily build & consume fully typesafe APIs without schemas or code generation
Basically, if we fetch data from an api endpoint, we usually do not know the shape of the data we are receiving, and therefore the data we receive is usually not type safe
tRPC solves this! For monolithic applications (when the server and client are on the same codebase) - we can create type-safe APIs
For most of our complicated routes - we use tRPC.
In this image, we can see that a complex data structure is being returned. It would be extremely annoying to redefine such a data structure later on. Instead, tRPC does this for us
tRPC uses tanstack query under the hood for route fetching. I highly recommend Tanstack query - it allows fetching to be done as a stateful hook which abstracts a lot of the asynchronous logic and exposes a really react principles friendly interface
honestly if i was creating a new application - i would heavily look into the tanstack associated tools - they are really well made