Comment by ninkendo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ninkendo | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been out of the web dev game for 7 years or so, completely missed react. Started in Perl, then ASP.NET, then Rails for about 5 years, then finally ended with an AngularJS SPA that ended up being a maintenance nightmare before I moved on to other areas of dev work that have nothing to do with the web.

The angularJS experience was so bad, not just because SPA’s were terrible but coding in JS/npm was a horrible ecosystem… I had a much much better time doing simple UI’s in Rails/HAML/jQuery than anything else. Server side rendering was so much simpler than any time I tried to even look at doing anything in react.

Would I like HTMX? What are the best practices around server side rendering? Have folks had good experience with Rust server-side code emitting HTMX pages? Any decent frameworks for this that are as opinionated/useful as Rails was for me?

I tend to regard Rails and Django as being appealing to people with a roughly similar mindset with regards to web development and htmx feels like it fits into that philosophy - at least more so than the fast bulk of the front end ecosystem (which often makes me wonder if my brain is wired differently to the people that make this stuff)

If you like templates and/or mixed-static/server generated HTML, then you might like HTMX.

It can get unwieldy if the app requires complex state management. While you can (somehwat hackishly) return JSON, its not really what its for.

Its kind of a throwback to the days of PHP, except without the page refreshes.

I still use Twig templates for a couple of my simple marketing websites, backed by about 100 lines of PHP to make it work. Simple enough that my non-programmer friend can edit it, powerful enough that... well it's not that powerful but it can do templates, which is all I want out of it. And I can still fall back to PHP if I do need to sprinkle some server-side magic in it. Stable, no maintenance, just keeps working and working, over a decade later.

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