HTMX - What they don't want you to know!

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HTMX or what's known as "hypertext with a little bit of AJAX" is really making web development easier and bringing the old good days of only working with HTML without the need for new frontend libraries, frameworks or even doing and handling HTTP requests. It provides a simple syntax that makes everything simplified and easier to work with! But the real question is, "Is it actually worth the hype!"

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⭐ Timestamps ⭐
00:00 Intro
00:18 Htmx brief intro
02:03 The Javascript Framework
04:13 The idea behind Htmx
06:42 Htmx and Ajax
10:20 Multi Page app using Ajax

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[KangoV]

We have a load of dashboards for all our internal services. These are being successfully converted to pure htmx. We are seeing that we can move quicker. The JS devs are moving to backend which gives us so much more bandwidth to get important features added. It's awesome imo.

[BobKane-gx]

I think this is where you are wrong. It's like doing a 'hello world' and then concluding that it's not scalable. I have been on various React projects and found them overengineered and hard to maintain. I recently switched to HTMX, and it's like night and day. Functionalities are shipped to production 60% faster and cheaper using HTMX compared to React. The code is easier to read and maintain, and new joiners to the project pick up the application code base much more quickly. I have dropped React and most single-page applications (SPAs) from my development stack unless they are required. So, right now, it's 90% HTMX and 10% React, after five years of React development.

[mattskelton]

I wish people would stop saying HTMX is only good for small projects. It really shows how twisted web development has become in the last 10 years.

[HaraldEngels]

HTMX is absolutely great. It makes HTML how it should have been developed during the last 15 years. And for someone who is developing websites since 1996 the functionality of HTMX is a godsent. The web was never so poorly performing and unreliable since the dawn of the fat JS-clients. This geek BS needs to end asap and HTMX is paving the way into a healthy again world wide web.

[thedoctor]

htmx isn't just about simple projects, and its main benefit isn't that you can get started with it faster. Its purpose is to change how/where state is managed because react is arguably a mess of a way to do things. htmx clients are stateless frontends, and are backend agnostic. It also doesn't use a virtual dom. It's good, clean engineering, which is a lot more than I can say for some libraries.

[SXsoft]

"we all love working with react" ahahahahha good one

[punkweb]

Problem #1, you're requesting json with htmx... That defeats the purpose entirely.

[perfectomprg]

I think that frontend developers sometimes view themselves as a priest cast, and feel threatened by simple frameworks that ‘anyone’ can use. HyperCard also threatened full-time developers back in the day.

[MrJinwright]

I'm glad you tried HTMX but it's not intended to use JSON data or to be rendered client side. The HTML should be rendered server side.

[LusidDreaming]

This take directly contradicts a lot of what the HTMX page he's viewing says. If you actually take the time to read over their "book, " they do not at all say you shouldnt use JS (or client side scripting in general). Instead, they put limits on what you should use scripting for. I'd also challenge people to try using it before you assume it can't do what React does. Their example implements custom menus/toolbar, infinite scrolling, active search, form validation, etc, all with minimal scripting (but not none). They even point out when you should and shouldn't use it. But I think this whole SPA hype has caused people to miss out on how powerful hypermedia can be. Their book is not a long read and definitely worth it for at least getting a different perspective on things.

[jondoe]

Htmx itself is a javascript library with helper functions for common use case.

[ryanleemartin]

I think you might arrive at a different conclusion if you didn't try to turn HTMX into a client side renderer like React.

[alanonym]

The main issue here imo is that you took a JSON end point to test a library that is supposed to work with endpoints that can feed html, which is basically like judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree. So your html looks bloated and you had to import 2 other dependencies since your html is not supposed to parse the JSON.

Then you extrapolated to say that is was not good for big teams, and I don't really understand how you came to that conclusion based on your previous analysis. You said nothing negative about htmx and then suddenly it is good only for small projects ?

[oligreenfield]

For me web dev it’s just a fun hot mess. We add something simple html+css+js then someone decide to add complexity for no reason. Angular React or other are way to over kill for 99.9% of website. HTMX is just way to return to the root of web dev.

[SRG-Learn-Code]

The intro is kind of misleading, htmx is javascript, you don't need to write it yourself but it is and needs javascript. Don't expects htmx to work with js disabled.

[RealDevastatia]

For an actual programmer, nothing is hard to do in vanilla JavaScript and DOM.

[attainconsult]

oh dear did so well till the end, this scales incredibly well. I started in 92 after 5 years of BBS have been through all the frameworks and I mean all, settled on vue for the last 8 years or so with too many journeys into react and angular, toyed with svelte.

Now I am back with a java stack, zero build time (modern java compiles as you write) high performance, serverless, monolith, dist architecture, fast deploy times and when I need a bit more I can sprinkle a little javascript.

That's old school full stack and it's disruptive!

[onnot]

switched from VUE Nuxt what I realy loved to HTMX. It's simple a lot less work to work with HTMX. And building very complex projects with it

[memk]

Wasn't this..THE recommended way to add function to DOM from like back? I am more surprised it took this long for anyone to make a library for

[patricknelson]

I have a very large app (PHP) and I could see myself using it *in conjunction with* Svelte web components (implemented via my library, svelte-retag). So, your Svelte components essentially _are_ “just HTML” (a separate abstraction) which can load/mount elegantly with HTMX. So, you still get your own backend (PHP, Go, Python, etc), some dynamic functionality where needed with HTMX and then a nice component-based design system with more intricate interactivity (where needed) with a front-end framework like Svelte. Not mutually exclusive!

So, right tool for the job. Large vs. small scale doesn’t really categorize it properly. It just depends on what you want to do. It’s just a tiny little 10kb tool and depends on the job you need.