A modest critique of Htmx

Re:A modest critique of Htmx by mattgreenrocks on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @09:32AM (#41787797)

Webdev is a different culture for sure. I think it brings a lot of newer devs in, which is fine, but then their lack of experience makes them vulnerable to groupthink, choosing easy over simple, demagoguery ("it's different this time!" seems true if you don't have prior experience) and needing to jump to the newest flashy thing. I'd also argue that this shift implicitly devalues the actual building of things (which is hard to assess and requires expertise) in favor of social clout (which is easy to assess), but this could just be coincidental with the rise of social media. Regardless, there is brand-building you can do and people routinely conflate social clout with technological prowess.

I gave up on webdev when this started to set in. Honestly, it felt like a bunch of kids chasing thoughtful engineering out by simply making more noise. Everyone wanted a magic library that relieved them of thinking, but the only way to make decent software is to think deeply about what data flows where, and how it gets there.

I've since rekindled an interest in it after finding some tech that did click with me: Quarkus + Renarde, htmx, Svelte. All of these are off the beaten path and have users that choose to use them, versus those that have to do, and I really think it makes a difference.

> This is why I've been slowly trying to make the transition out of web dev, at least FE.

Systems/backend dev is a lot more friendly to thoughtful engineering IMO. Check out Java, Golang, and Rust and see what libraries/users you click best with.

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Re:A modest critique of Htmx by stephenhuey on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @12:12PM (#41789564)

Pretty cool, I hadn't heard of Renarde and it looks promising. Around 8 years ago, I really wanted Aurelia to win the SPA wars but they're still pretty niche even though they've been growing lately. But honestly, after playing with everything over all these years, I still believe a server-side framework with minimal amounts of JS is ideal for most projects, especially all those internal corporate web apps but also for B2B stuff and even the average consumer-facing app. People say consumers are more demanding now, but how many developers are really working on something that caters to the most demanding consumers? Unless you need the most snazzy UX ever, just don't.

And honestly, using Rails or other server-side frameworks, you can get very far with way less effort than those expensive front-end teams by simply using Hotwire:

https://hotwired.dev

Sending down rendered HTML using Hotwire Turbo requires far less time, and HTML over the wire is in reality no heavier than sending down JSON. If you absolutely need a bit more interactivity on the front-end while avoiding a server roundtrip, it's easy to drop in little Stimulus JS controllers as-needed. From my journeys to and fro in the real world, I've seen most projects do not need more than that, and are arguably wasting budget trying to use heavier tools than that! For most sizeable projects, you can do more in Rails & Hotwire with fewer developers than a 6-person team using their favorite server side language and React. I'm not saying you have to use Ruby on Rails. I'm saying I wish the dev world would embrace this paradigm in whatever their favorite language/frameworks are.

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