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Comment by red_hare | Hacker News Reader

These frameworks are cute, and I understand the desire to avoid the modern SPA JavaScript build systems, but it always seems like so much more work than just writing HTML.

I swear, HTML/CSS + Flask + HTMX gets you so far these days. Then, you can throw in some AlpineJS for any inter-element interaction you need and build a responsive SPA without almost any JavaScript.

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Alpine is great for your blog, but it's not even a little bit tempting for real world professional projects. Looking back at every project I've worked on there's no shot I would ever select Alpine for any of them.

These type of condescending comments really scream "I'm not even a web developer but here's my strong opinion as someone who only makes toy front ends to demo my data work"

would you use one of these python-to-web frameworks like rio though? I think gp was just saying alpine was a good alternative to that.

Also 0 chance. Well maybe under some specific unrealistic constraints.

But I am a fan of alternative approaches to the typical stuff just for the fun and learning aspect of it. I'd never come on here and be like "oh well that's cute, but it's useless, why can't we just x".

For example I think Imba is pretty cool and I've used it for a couple throwaway personal projects just to give a spin, but I'd not use it at work.

An undesired level of condescendence for a message against it, no? My first impression...

Back in the day we did plenty of "real world professional projects" with jQuery.

I don't see why you couldn't with Alpine.

Yeah at some point you may need a more sophisticated solution but plenty of projects don't need React. This very forum you're using is just a very simple vanilla js file.

>Back in the day we did plenty of "real world professional projects" with jQuery.

And they were terribly unperformant, bug ridden, messes of spaghetti that I wouldn't wish on anyone in the year 2024. Things evolved past that for a reason.

Bold of you to assume that modern web dev isn’t also a terribly unperformant, bug-ridden mess of spaghetti.

Exactly.

I've seen way more bloated React/Angular SPA apps than the typical PHP/jQuery Web 2.0 from back in the day.

> Back in the day we did plenty of "real world professional projects" with jQuery.

I was there, it sucked

And you don't even need build systems for modern SPAs. You can write web components in plain JS, load JS and CSS with standard module imports. Use bare import specifiers with import maps. Things have gotten much simpler.

Rio Dev here. I can see where you're coming from. Seeing an experience web-dev work can be mindblowingly fast. But there's two sides to each story - there's tons of developers that are experts in their own fields but that aren't familiar with web technologies. That's where frameworks like Rio, streamlit, reflex, etc. come in.

We've been getting a lot of reactions from people being surprised how quickly they can create Rio apps after just a few hours, when previously creating UIs was always a major roadblock for them. Seeing these reactions has been extremely rewarding.

Flask + HTMX + AlpineJS always seem like so much more work than just writing JavaScript.

All of it is so much more work compared to PHP + HTML + CSS (and no JS).

Is it? Why spend so much time learning PHP when you can just use JS?

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