alt Hacker NewsI am tired of people using the smallest "Hello World" example to demonstrate how something is better than React -- "See, you don't need all these things to get a website up and running!"
Of course it will work. I can vibe code the most terrible web framework you have seen within 20 minutes and claim it is better than React, but what does it prove?
> You write zero JavaScript > The whole library is ~14kb gzipped
Oh sure, if there is nothing else in your UI, and if your Python/Go/whatever backend server has 0 dependency, which almost never happens.
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For what it's worth. Our intranet apps run on a combination of Python + HTMX. We haven't run in to anything we couldn't do yet. The paradigm of swapping parts of the DOM in and out is very easy to work with.
No one is forcing you to use it. I haven't used it myself, but htmx looks to be a good solution for many web applications.
There's also the opposite camp: when you show very complex scenarios being simple in some technology but the hello world is harder.
e.g. effect-ts which makes error handling, dependency injection, concurrency, retries, stack safety, interruptions, etc, simple but the hello world already hits people with "wait, it's 6 lines of code to print hello world!? Trash".
Here's a real-time-ish planning poker written in Go + Htmx in ~500 LoC
App (can take a few seconds to spin up if dormant): https://estimate.work/
DecisionMe is one the apps I created using htmx. I am not the owner of the company, so I cannot comp you, but I can promise in good faith: this is not a toy app.
Check out Fizzy from 37signals. They used a similar HATEOAS approach to build it with Hotwire
source: https://github.com/basecamp/fizzy
I don't think this is a better approach than React. It's just an approach. It's viable. It's fine
In fairness, the article has a section titled “The Numbers” which links to this: https://htmx.org/essays/a-real-world-react-to-htmx-port/
Right, it's also bothered me that the Vue docs spend so much time showing how it's a "progressive" framework. "Just use it for one component!" And show examples of how it can be lazy loaded in for your special complex spot that needs vue.
Like c'mon, if I'm using Vue, I'm using Vue. Same for React. Strap me into the native state management solution for your framework, your router, your preconfigured bundler. I'm not here to mess about or I'd have just stuck with vanilla.
To put a bit more colour on this, I think the fear of most devs with an ultra-simple framework like this is that eventually you hit a wall where you need it to do something it doesn't natively do, and because the only thing you know is these magical declarative hx-whatever attributes, there's no way forward.
I appreciate the basic demos, but I think what would really sell me is showing the extensibility story. Show me what it looks like when I need it to do something a bit beyond what it has in the box. Where do I add the JavaScript for that? Is it raw, inline, or are we back to packages and bundling and a build step? Am I building application JS, or some kind of extension or plugin to htmx itself? How chained am I going to be to its specific paradigms and opinions?
The page says htmx isn't for writing a true SPA like Google Docs, but where's the line? Show me an app that has pushed up against the limits of this system, and what happens in that scenario.