I've read from people here saying they had great productivity gains and simplicity using these options.
There are many options though with quite a bit of differences and I wanted to hear from people who have evaluated some of them and what they settled on.
I have a previous experience with VueJS and Django REST Framework. It is nice but it's a whole other kind of work. Too many build tools, CIs, State Management hell...
I'll, if I can, keep developing with the new-new stuff (Unpoly and htmx). Probably won't be 100% of the time since it's far for mainstream technologies.
htmx is a relatively low level extension to HTML, by design. Unpoly offers a lot more structure, such as layers, which you would need to implement on your own or using another library (e.g. tailwinds or bootstrap) if you are using htmx.
This is reflected in their overall sizes: 11k for htmx, 41k for unpoly.
I don't view either as better in general: they are two different approaches to building hypermedia-oriented applications, one more structured and one less. Which one is better for your particular application depends on your own engineering needs and tastes.
Definitely not "zero" JS, but our JS interop source file is only ~200 lines of code at the moment.
We have some incredibly complicated UI interactions (essentially canvas drawing) which would be a nightmare to synchronize state for. Being able to keep all that state server-side makes it way easier to cope with. Our clients are basically just a dumb terminal on the other side of a websocket.
An example of the DSL in htmx I mentioned (from https://htmx.org/docs/#validation):
<form hx-post="/test">
<input _="on htmx:validation:validate
if my.value != 'foo'
call me.setCustomValidity('Please enter the value foo')
else
call me.setCustomValidity('')"
name="example">
</form>
htmx is a straight forward extension to HTML as a hypermedia, facilitating more functionality within the original hypermedia model of the web. A good pure htmx example would be active search:
https://htmx.org/examples/active-search/
This is purely declarative htmx that enables a UI pattern that most developers would assume requires that they write javascript.
Of course there are going to be situations when a purely hypermedia-based solution isn't going to work and you will need client-side scripting. VanillaJS works fine for many of these (htmx has an extensive event model for you to hook into.) A lot of people like AlpineJS, which is a great library. And, if you are adventurous, you can give hyperscript a try for these needs.
But that shouldn't be confused with htmx, which provides a lot of functionality out of the box as purely hypermedia-oriented extension to HTML.
As an aside, with VanillaJS you can't simply use an "on" attribute for non-DOM events, which is why people like solutions like Alpine or hyperscript, which offer general event handling inline on elements.
I've used HTMX _alongside_ some more fully-baked JS on our site. There are some particular use cases that are a lot more rapidly accomplished by adding a little `hx-post` and `hx-swap` attribute than writing out the JS itself. It hasn't replaced our usage of vanilla JavaScript or anything, but is a nice lighter-weight dependency that plays nicely with Django templating IMO.
Hyperscript is another project from the same author of htmx and is a side project not related to htmx. Though, it can be complementary.
I don't think it solves every problem efficiently, but as SahAssar mentions (with some thoughtful criticism) below, as your needs become more complex, the framework provides at least some kind of escape hatch into more traditional programming, admittedly strange though it looks embedded as a DSL that gets put into an HTML attribute.
On the other hand there are some cool behaviors that I've leveraged to great success -- in the responses you return from your backend that HTMX is interpreting, you can encode data into headers that HTMX will turn around and trigger as DOM events. Pretty neat way to interact between your front and back-end both on a DOM and a JS runtime level.
I've worked with Livewire quite a bit and think it's a brilliant concept. It's very easy to get started and you get great results without much training.
However, as soon as you encounter problems or want to implement things that deviate from the standard case, you quickly realize that this is a new technology. There isn't a solution for every problem on Stackoverflow and apart from the official documentation there is very little good information.
So for complex apps, it's often better to go with VueJS which has a better and more comprehensive ecosystem. The great thing is that Inertia.js exists as a link to Laravel, so you don't have to build an API and you don't have to worry about things like routing or authentication.
[1] https://laravel-livewire.com/
Edit: Add more background
Edit: To be clear, there was a solution, a very good one indeed. It was just hard to find.
This is like saying "React is bad because once I had a problem I don't remember".
So you can totally make an application only with server side technologies because it was how we did before and… it just worked. What is interesting is that all the frameworks, due to their age are very mature.
If you are ok with Python, I suggest you to go through the official Django tutorial, it’s pretty long (some hours iirc) but it covers a lot of topics by guiding you through the development of a complete application.
But other frameworks like Rails, Symfony, are also very mature. ASP.NET Core with Blazor is also nice but IMO, harder for a newcomer because it needs a lot of boilerplate.
All those technologies are pretty boring, but in the good way: they allow you to get shit done without thinking a lot about technical issues.
So since two years, I use the Hotwired stack on top of PHP (and now with Vite as bundler) and that is so far the best solution I found. I can like use the CMS integrated solution for handling forms, as an example, but can plug in Hotwired Turbo and some Stimulus controllers when I want things to happen async on the client. I now have my own set of generic stimulus controllers I reuse in every project. But at the end of the day, those websites work without JavaScript.
I recently took a look at Hotwire and Unpoly just to make sure I wasn’t missing out on something better. I found htmlx simple and intuitive.