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Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

web dev is a sewer

All my projects are server rendered with jinja/minijinja, bootstrap, jQuery, and htmx when I need a little bit of SPA behavior on forms.

No builds, just static <script src= tags. Very fast and easy. I'll never recommend anything else.

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I'm coming back to Django after a decade of experience with it post-0.96 and having moved to Next.js a few years ago. Going from 1,700 dependencies to 65 total with Django + Wagtail + HTMX.

Sounds more difficult then modern web frameworks. We've all done this for little projects, but anything with users or development teams, your method is DOA.

I disagree, most webapps, like 99.9% I would say, are just forms, links, and pages. Meaning, they can be done with 0 reactivity and that is the most simple and straightforward way to do it.

Less code is basically always better, so if you can skip the huge amounts of JS and orchestration required by modern web frameworks, then it will be easy. People are out here using React to render static pages. It's very overkill.

That can't be your measurement when you're loading 3 huge js libraries which are a lot more code then say svelte, which also excels at SSG.

Eh, there’s tradeoffs. They’re real. But I’ve done plenty of this on teams back in the day before all these frameworks and it can absolutely work. It may even be easier now with JS modules.

When I am given the choice to pick a stack, it is classical Java and .NET Web frameworks, with minimal JavaScript.

On hobby projects same script approach without any kind of build step.

With C#'s Blazor templating, you can ditch all JS logic, and use raw C# for all front-end logic, and have it all be transparently server rendered similar to how Phoenix has LiveView.

I also have experimented with HTMX and Django, and that seems to be a nice combination.

Everything is AJAX again.

I've a C# fanboy, but Blazor's DX just isn't very good compared to say Vite.

There are many conditions under which the hot reload just straight up crashes out regularly.

Hot reload definitely needs to grow.

And all the latency of classic ASP.Net Webforms. Click a button and see the page change in the length of a short yawn. Or, switch to client side wasm and load a payload that makes the typical react dev jealous.

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