Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

  • Hacker News
  • This happened 3 years ago... wondering what makes it news worthy today?
  • Using Django w/ frontend frameworks has been a struggle for me. (I only dabble as a hobbyist.) I think splitting the backend off into a restful API makes the marriage work. I've looked at django-rest-framework (https://www.django-rest-framework.org/) and django-ninja (https://django-ninja.dev/). Of course,, then you're discarding a lot of batteries that come with the django framework. Perhaps using Django templates for admin / internal facing work only, and React for customer-facing sites can be a healthy compromise?
  • Replace React / Vue with HTMX 2 years ago and still going strong.

    Hono + WebComponents + HTMX + serverless is the backend for my apps now.

  • Happy they did this. Htmx is a great fit for server rendering - which in many or most cases is what you should do in any case. You can always put a mini VueJS or ReactJS app inside of a template for a very custom interactivity.
    by sgt
  • I basically use HTMX for all my Web Apps, including PWA(s) that run as ~near native apps on iOS/Android. It's great! I aso pair this with DaisyUI+TailwindCSS. YOu really can't go wrong, there is something quite pleasant about writing your web apps in ordinary HTML with partials and the extensions that HTMX adds to the browser for SPA-like interactivity.
  • I think HTMX is a great fit for forum software. Forum websites mostly deliver non-interactive content in the form of text and maybe some audio, video, or image content. All of this can be represented as HTML and CSS.

    With HTMX you can do partial rendering and live updates via server-sent events. This gets you most of the way to the "client side" feel where things load dynamically based on user actions.

    The only properly dynamic SPA-like feature in a forum I can think of is a WYSIWYG editor, but that you can build as a web component. Maybe a flexible highlight and quote system would be a bit difficult in pure HTMX (think of the comment functionality in Medium posts). So you'd want to build a few things in client side JS. But the main experience could very well be built with HTMX.

  • I actually tried to use HTMX on a site recently. I used the 4.0 beta. The site needed an interactive filterable product-listing-page-type experience to list out all their vendors. Form filters on the left and the list of results "cards" on the right.

    The problem I had was that the entire experience became really slow when I had it all working together as one "response". Sending back all that HTML for an entire form with some large select lists as well as the response of results became noticeable laggy when there was more than a half dozen results.

    I ended up switching to Alpine Ajax (https://alpine-ajax.js.org/) and pulled the form out of the response and just used a local x-data on it to track the state. This greatly reduced the HTML I needed to send back to just the list of results. I did make the form a bit more complicated but the experience felt a lot snappier. Both versions just synced the form state from the URL and kept the initial render as full HTML from the server.

    I found that Alpine + Alpine Ajax was SMALLER than HTMX 4 even though (in my opinion) it offers a lot more features in a more approachable and intuitive way if you need to do interactivity and don’t want to trigger a request just to toggle some classes or attributes. Of course you can use both together (I started down that road) but you are mixing worlds and making the bundle size bigger at the same time.

    I still like HTMX and will probably use it again. I just found that with an interactive experience like a product listing page, where the HTML response was quite large/expensive to fetch, it wasn’t the best choice for that.

Explore Birbla archives

Removing React.js from the codebase and adapting Htmx for UI interactivity (2023) · Birbla