Comment by phil-martin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phil-martin | Hacker News Reader

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I've used it a fair bit in a equipment finance app I have built for a small company.

In the system I've used a mix of regular django templates, some Django unicorn, some HTMX, and some HTMX+Alpinejs

I pick the tool based on the the amount of interactivity I need on the page.

It's.... interesting. If you start out knowing you will do HTMX, then I found everything is much easier. Splitting off small small views to return just the right html after a hx-post is more labor intenstive than i would like, bit overall it's nice.

The hardest part I found was being able to have a fine level of control around the user experience, and solving that required adding a lot of javascript, which made me wonder if it was worth the effort and should have instead just used Vue to handle it.

I've ended up using a lot of HX-Refresh in responses (causes a page refresh) because it was easier to do that than to ensure all the different parts of the page updated at the right time.

The way it cascades htmx values down the tree is really handy, and lends itself to consise attributes on the html.

Overall I'd give it a silver-coated bullet rating. Certainly not a solid silver bullet. :)

> It's.... interesting. If you start out knowing you will do HTMX, then I found everything is much easier. Splitting off small small views to return just the right html after a hx-post is more labor intenstive than i would like, bit overall it's nice.

This was almost exactly my first impression of HTMX as well. It's a huge step forward! However, for my tastes it demands too many tiny views and micromanaging, which somewhat felt like a drag on my productivity. For an alternative, take a look at Unpoly [1] which has more batteries included (i.e. create layers of interactivity that update lower layers automatically) and is centered around full page requests/diffs and less focused on injecting small page fragments everywhere. For my small apps, I could do everything in one view that took three or more views with HTMX. I can only imagine the views exploding for a modestly complex site. The biggest penalty for Unpoly is that it is quite a bit (~2X) slower than HTMX, which needs to be kept in mind and managed for larger pages with a lot of interactivity. I suspect this is because Unpoly loads the entire page and does a DOM diff to see what it needs to update, as opposed to injecting just a page fragment. In my tests, I was able to manage around this issue using layers. The big upside to Unpoly is that the full page refresh architecture aligns very neatly with Django's request/response cycle, which gives you pretty seamless interactivity and form validation. It also has a lot of batteries included that HTMX lacks. I think HTMX is terrific and revolutionary, but Unpoly fits my brain better while doing Django development.

[1] https://unpoly.com/tutorial

I also like Unpoly very much.

I'm using it for a new frontend right now. Combined with a thoughtful CSS design like CUBE[1] that utilizes components but also leverages utilities to reduce CSS bloat I am writing mostly Ruby and HTML and very little JS and CSS and it feels great.

It's kind of back to the basics which means that I also do not worry about being on some framework's upgrade & dependency train or the mental health of future application developers/maintainers.

[1]: https://piccalil.li/blog/i-used-tailwind-for-the-u-in-cube-c...

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