Comment by sgt
6 hours ago
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.
Putting ReactJS or VueJS for a little interactivity is hardly the correct approach. It makes no sense to bring them in for "a little". What made React and React-like (Angular v2, Vue.js) frameworks stabilise is that they're about the right abstractions and everything else for managing dynamic html converges to about the same thing.
Why not? You can have server side routing that returns the page and then react then takes over and hydrates a small part within the page or the complete page. A similar approach is used for the islands architecture, and you can even combine different frontend frameworks for maximum flexibility, e.g. developer preference. You can decide to load your frontend libraries lazily or as shared scripts so they are cached and only take up some bandwidth on initial load (a couple of kB minified and zipped).
In principle I agree that putting React or Vue in for a little interactivity is a bad approach, if the same can be achieved with Htmx, which it usually can.
However for some really complex mini apps, that's another story. But for the rest of those CRUD pages, you can go simple server side rendered.
"Complex mini app" is one hell of a concept.
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Astro then.
That’s basically a massive hack. Every real world app will need enough js that htmx will require you to put js on front end and you’ll need to hack it together. Just like we did php+js 15 years ago.
I've found this to not be true at all. You can do quite a lot with just HTMX. Any client-side Javascript™ you strictly need can often be done fairly minimally with Locality of Behaviour (LoB).
LoB isn't going to reconcile Chat Messages rendering state and Notifications. Their dependent state by nature. HTMX largely seems to ignore this reality.
In fact, the complexity of Chat Messages and Notifications synchronisation is one of the prime reasons why React exists.
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I think HTMX lacks a sensible way to do composition and reuse on the component level, something that react/vue/solid do extremely well. Since you are basically mostly swapping html content, it gets tricky if you want to reuse partials.
That "massive hack" is supposed to be one of the core features of React.
What I've found in practice is that HTMX is extensible enough that I can write a small amount of javascript to "put a funny plug on the end of HTMX" to talk to say Leafletjs if I'm drawing maps, and want things dynamically updated.
It works quite well, and saves me an awful lot of tedious mucking about with other stuff.
For what it's worth, Claude Code is really good with HTMX and with adding that glue logic if needed.
But it is different this time, we are going back to HTML! /s