Serving html is trivial but do we really need every back-end juggling this stuff just to make these guys happy? What do they do when they have to support a number of clients. Oops...
I don't see this design pattern as forcing a particular back-end framework?
It's merely shifting the frontend<-->backend contract from JSON to HTML.
Some backend engineers arguably would prefer HTML. Especially if their backends weren't Node. Backends were originally C servers that sent a string of HTML back. I think backend engineers are fully capable of "juggling" with this new/old paradigm.
I know some projects plan to only ever use browser clients, so this may seem irrelevant for them. But I'd rather not try to predict how a business will want to use it's data in the future, and would prefer to design a backend that can be adapted to many scenarios without being bound to a particular client.
Sure, then the backend can expose a gRPC / protobuf interface instead. Mobile apps can readily deserialize this and it will be more performant, both in network bandwidth and data parsing, too, especially with first-party to first-party SDKs. It's strongly typed and serves as a better data contract language than both HTML and JSON. JSON is loosey goosey because of JavaScript.
Then the frontend server now plays the role of aggregating data from gRPC backends and converting it to HTML.
The gravitation to JSON is a case of web developer familiarity.
When you build something that is highly transactional, say booking train tickets, and you don't have the resources, like dozen of 200k-400k a year devs, you are better of with a really short path between the where the state is stored and what is displayed to the user.
What we are seeing currently is something like that : DB(ms sql, ...) <-> [ microservices(java spring ?) ] <-> FrontEnd (react ?) With few integration tests and load testing, legacy authentication with oauth or oidc on top, and a really poor user experience (see https://www.sncf-connect.com/). The user experience is in fact poorer that it use to be with php, and even lousier than it use to be with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
The "antijs crowd" is saying : When it's relevant, let's make more simple systems, but let's still offer solution for some interactivity in the frontend. That's it, it's not a "world view".
https://www.reddit.com/r/htmx/comments/ufsqcj/vue_angular_re...
> So, consider something like google sheets, with a large number of dependent cells that need to be recomputed and synced on every cell entry. Probably not a good idea to jam an HTTP request after every cell edit, and a place where a more elaborate SPA framework is called for. On the other hand, maybe htmx is useful for the settings page for that application. And for something like Gmail, htmx would be perfect.