[runoisenze]

We’re using HTMX along with Alpine JS and a Python/Jinja2 backend in a commercial startup. So far, it’s working great. The UI is simple to code and we don’t have such a mental leap when moving from backend Python code to working on the UI. This is advantageous for us as we can prioritize hiring backend Python engineers, and don’t need to build out a team of frontend engineers just yet.

We don’t have to write very much JavaScript at all to achieve a fairly modern UI experience. I wish the error handling was better in HTMX. We had to write a fair amount of JavaScript just to handle errors and put user friendly error messages on the screen. Maybe this has improved?

I think there’s a great opportunity to attract more developers to this stack:

1. An open source reference app built using HTMX that shows the advantages of using HTMX particularly where it shines, along with best practices for building commercial quality solutions

2. VSCode/other editor plug-ins to improve the developer experience working with this stack (Alpine, HTMX, and Jinja)

[halfcat]

Part of the challenge of a reference implementation is that HTMX works with every backend. The Hypermedia Systems book [1] has a reference implementation in Flask (Python), but that’s less helpful if you’re in a very different ecosystem.

I think what’s needed is a sort of, repository of patterns. The main criticism of HTMX is it turns into spaghetti if not well structured. But that is also true of React and needing backend API endpoints well organized, and avoiding React hook-hell. And React has established those robust patterns of usage.

[1] https://hypermedia.systems/

[runoisenze]

> I think what’s needed is a sort of, repository of patterns.

Agreed. I was thinking about a reference application to demonstrate those patterns.

[runoisenze]

Thanks for the link! I’ll check it out.