[msolberg]

As a devops engineer who has recently been tasked with building UIs for our team and our developers, HTMX is a godsend. I create apps that often get steadily worked on for weeks and then only maintenance once and a while after that. I used to write django apps, but recently switched to a go backend with go html templates and htmx. This allows me to push everything in one docker image and avoid the black box nature of big frameworks that I don't have the time to fully understand.

I know this doesn't add to the conversation very well but I just want to throw it out there that htmx is a good replacement for a larger framework that you don't fully understand.

Also shoutout aplineJs for making small JS changes easy.

[internet101010]

Alpine + htmx + tailwind is pretty much what I use for every quick little front-end thing now. I do still use Django but plan to transition to Rust as a way to get more comfortable with Rust.

[jslakro]

What do you use alpine for? htmx is not enough?

[arcanemachiner]

Alpine is for client-powered reactivity and HTMX is for server-powered reactivity.

Think about pressing a button that opens a modal with content already delivered by the server (like a settings modal). You don't need to make a HTTP request for that, so you could use Alpine.

Let's say instead that you click a user icon and you want to render a modal that contains user info which hasn't been fetched from the server (because why waste resources loading all this data the user might not see or need?). When clicking that icon, you could use HTMX to fetch the user data from the server then display the resulting content in a modal.

Two different actions with similar visual results (from the user's perspective), but one is all client-side and one requires extra info from the server.

Alpine and HTMX are frequently confused this way, as they solve seemingly similar problems from different ends of the network.

[recursivedoubts]

Scripting is part of web development, htmx endorses hypermedia-friendly scripting:

https://htmx.org/essays/hypermedia-friendly-scripting/

https://hypermedia.systems/client-side-scripting/

[karmarepellent]

As someone with a similar task (building internal tooling) I must agree. HTMX really is a godsend, especially when you are already feeling comfortable writing backend code. In my case I simply familiarized myself with HTMX and augmented the backend code to return HTML. Yeah, it is obviously a little more than that, but the transition was really smooth.

[ajayvk]

Hypermedia based web applications are a great fit for developing internal and operational tools. I have been building https://github.com/claceio/clace for making development and deployment easier for such web apps.

[recursivedoubts]

:) that's great to hear man