Full Disclosure, I am CEO of HTMX
Htmx 4.0 (four.htmx.org)
dec0dedab0de 10 hours ago
jdlshore 9 hours ago
stanac 9 hours ago
dec0dedab0de 9 hours ago
ecshafer 9 hours ago
testdelacc1 8 hours ago
Please take a look at the official documentation for htmx, which specifically clarifies that the author owns many hinges.
mkl 4 hours ago
DANmode 4 hours ago
Absolute madman.
Barbing 6 hours ago
It's just about all Twitter links, where's XCancel/Nitter when you need 'em :(
crtasm 5 hours ago
andrewflnr an hour ago
> You can put it on your LinkedIn, because it’s true.
I only take LinkedIn seriously under extreme protest, so this is extremely tempting.
DANmode 4 hours ago
dfee 9 hours ago
> Full Disclosure, I am CEO of HTMX
i think you've found a good job!
nzoschke 13 hours ago
Pretty much every experiment I build now starts with Go, htmx, and SQLite to keep things simple and fast but still responsive.
I put a few more thoughts about this here:
https://housecat.com/blog/the-hugs-stack-hypermedia-unix-go-...
kaycebasques 12 hours ago
sgt 12 hours ago
In fact, I find Django and Postgres to be the best solution for htmx but Go stack is probably almost as good in terms of developer velocity and obviously much faster. So I think that's a good solution.
You can really build powerful production apps with htmx, and what people underestimate is how good it is with AI assisted development (Claude understands it and does it well, and if any JS glue logic on a specific template is required, it's pretty well written and not a mess).
Analemma_ 11 hours ago
WD-42 8 hours ago
farmeroy 8 hours ago
michaelchisari 12 hours ago
FartinMowler 9 hours ago
pepperoni_pizza 8 hours ago
35mm 7 hours ago
Skill.md here: https://github.com/dunctk/rasx-app-framework
shimman 10 hours ago
dimaaan 9 hours ago
And if you do, why start with a simpler framework?
trueno 3 hours ago
ajayvk 2 hours ago
rednb 7 hours ago
This is not a criticism but I suspect that the people enjoying HTMX are either people preferring old-school server-side rendering or react users.
Just sharing my experience, because HTMX is the absolute darling of hacker news.
Since i mainly develop real SPA, i found that is more complex than just using typscrpit if you build something non-trivial as managing state on the server is not fun at all.
In my opinion if you are happy using angular, you'll find that HTMX is a step backward in terms for dev experience. Can't speak about react, but since it is not a battery included stack unlike Angular, i can understand why many people find they'd be better off moving things server-side instead of messing around with 15 third-party libraries. My 2 cents
perardi 6 hours ago
Here’s the thing: there’s still a place for HTMX. Lots of places. But “building an SPA but not actually and SPA” is not a lane for HTMX. Nor do they promote HTMX for that purpose. Really quite the opposite.
Different tools for different jobs. (Me? I honestly love React, just a more minimal stack. Zustand and TanStack and Vite. No Redux or Next.JS)
embedding-shape 5 hours ago
I'm not sure why so many people seemingly fall into the trap of trying to find one tool and then use that absolutely everywhere. I mean, I'm familiar with it as in "it's fun" as I used Nix as a framework for a static website builder, but I keep seeing people making those sort of choices professionally too. Like when React first became popular, then suddenly people try to jam it into absolutely everything, until they slowly walk back and then after some years agree that maybe it's good for some things, not for everything and not as a default.
perardi 4 hours ago
And, yeah, HTMX is truly great for sites with limited interactivity. You really, really do not want or need a full React Leaning Tower of Pisa stack for a simple presentational website.
kvirani 5 hours ago
radicalbyte 6 hours ago
Then HTMX is to them what the micro-ORMs were for me (and, if you've been in .Net for a couple of decades, I suspect you too).
xp84 6 hours ago
Really? I've never found that difficult. Sessions exist, URL parameters exist... Perhaps in a complex SPA you can have trouble, but so many of the "applications" I've worked on are just glorified documents.
fatplexer 6 hours ago
Seriously DB->json->client->toHtml
DB->toHtml->client
Just imagine if that html wire format also conveyed the interactivity too and you eliminate the issues. And you can always seperate whatever concerns you want in whatever tpl lang of your choice.
Also htmx 4 is kinda just an worse datastar funnily enough In it's own way.
turtlebits 16 minutes ago
aidenn0 5 hours ago
Do you not have a database for your backend? Managing state is kind of their thing.
intrasight 2 hours ago
That's on you not on your platform
james2doyle 12 hours ago
I looked into this when I tried HTMX 4 on a project earlier this year. I actually found that https://alpine-ajax.js.org/ was smaller than HTMX while providing all the features I needed. It is one of the sanctioned projects they link to so I felt good using it
recursivedoubts 11 hours ago
zanderwohl 11 hours ago
"let us rething how extensions can and should work,"
I think you meant rethink here.
recursivedoubts 11 hours ago
threesmegiste 7 hours ago
miguel-muniz 7 hours ago
havaloc 12 hours ago
matthew-craig 9 hours ago
LVB 8 hours ago
havaloc 2 hours ago
Baguette5242 13 hours ago
GrayShade 13 hours ago
For what? Don't leave us hanging!
recursivedoubts 13 hours ago
all2 12 hours ago
hmokiguess 8 hours ago
bluesnowmonkey 8 hours ago
thewhitetulip 3 hours ago
fionic 3 hours ago
alkonaut 7 hours ago
praseodym 13 hours ago
recursivedoubts 13 hours ago
chainwax 13 hours ago
ryanisnan 12 hours ago
I have enjoyed working with htmx very much.
I'm still skeptical of htmx being the foundation for a 100-year web service, but I think this is a really worthwhile goal. I'll add that aside from static HTML, I don't have a better option.
smt88 12 hours ago
Perfect is the enemy of good and all that. If something is useful, it’s possible to fix the architecture later. The only counter-example I know of has been GitHub, which was built on RoR and so poorly planned that it’s still biting Microsoft on a regular basis.
ryanisnan 11 hours ago
satvikpendem 10 hours ago
smt88 8 hours ago
satvikpendem 3 hours ago
mostlysimilar 9 hours ago
Disagree. The RoR front end was way more stable and usable than the mess they have made now.
smt88 8 hours ago
RoR is the only framework I’ve ever heard of being so bad that it killed startups. I personally know of two that were doing well, but RoR was so brittle and slow that they couldn’t hire enough to keep it going. This is compounded by Ruby devs being pretty rare.
xp84 6 hours ago
This is such a "poor carpenter blaming his tools" take.
RoR isn't holding you back from writing performant, high-quality code. However, letting inexperienced developers run wild without supervision does end up with a codebase committing most of the deadly sins of software: (1) proliferation of competing patterns (2) proliferation of competing third-party libraries, leading to more #1, (3) inadequate test suite, and (4) an app that serves up so many 500 errors that you can't tell which are new and/or which indicate a problem. #4 is definitely more common in untyped languages, since that whole class of bugs can't be caught at compile time.
By the time a lot of these "startups" get to the mature state they have like a 7-year-old codebase that is beyond help. But you can use Ruby and Rails responsibly. I've seen it done. Usually all that's needed is to apply yourself to understanding how to cache, and then, identifying the key expensive high-traffic endpoints and converting them from ActiveRecord N+1 messes into single-query eager-loaded beasts, sometimes skipping ActiveRecord's object instantiation. Sounds scary, but it's inevitable for a popular application on any language/framework that you'll need to go beyond the tutorial-grade code for key transactions. This kind of thing is what Staff Engineers are for.
ashwinsundar 8 hours ago
smt88 8 hours ago
This is Hacker News. This is exactly the place to tell people they’re overanalyzing and should just build something.
ashwinsundar 10 minutes ago
xp84 6 hours ago
ashwinsundar 4 hours ago
euroderf 3 hours ago
tdhz77 17 minutes ago
dajonker 9 hours ago
For pushing updates, we use ActionCable, but we do it in a different way from what we used to do with Turbo Streams: when a record is updated, instead of sending HTML from the server to the client with instructions on what to replace, we only send a small JSON payload with the ID of the element that was updated. On the client side, an event is dispatched that any DOM element with <hx-trigger="<resource-id>:updated from:body"> will trigger on. For the rest it's just basic HTMX, only the trigger is "custom".
arjie 13 hours ago
replwoacause 12 hours ago
nchmy 12 hours ago
replwoacause 12 hours ago
nchmy 12 hours ago
replwoacause 2 hours ago
7bit 12 hours ago
nchmy 12 hours ago
osigurdson 12 hours ago
That doesn't mean do dumb / complicated / bloated stuff for no reason. If the best thing for your users is static html, use that.
KPGv2 11 hours ago
recursivedoubts 12 hours ago
giraffe_lady 11 hours ago
They love htmx! Claude will independently suggest using it instead of more general js frameworks for smaller projects. A gpt model told me, and I wrote this down because it was striking, "htmx won the argument it was making."
It's the same thing with rust. I'm an ocaml expert and ocaml genuinely fits a lot of the problems I work with better regardless of that. But because of when the models were trained and what they were trained on, a certain sort of alt-consensus opinion is frozen into them, and it believes rust is a better choice for nearly everything!
I think you're good for the next few years at least. It's an open question what happens after that dead internet theory recursive loop of llms trained on llm output etc so who knows you might be good forever.
sroerick 10 hours ago
All the stuff I lost in training data I gained back in having great compiler feedback.
I don't think agents are nearly as restricted by language or training data as we think.
recursivedoubts 10 hours ago
Thank you for your kind words!
replwoacause 6 hours ago
sroerick 10 hours ago
If you have 1/5th the context to consume, that's going to generate better code than the comparable typescript, even if the language is an esoteric one.
cyanydeez 9 hours ago
sgt 12 hours ago
Capricorn2481 12 hours ago
One is a programming language used for writing client side code, and the other is a minimal library that makes server sent documents more ergonomic. Yes, it's a JS library with a few nice conveniences, but the main draw of HTMX encourages a completely different app architecture than what the average dev would arrive at with plain JS.
They're just two different things to me, and so it seems irrelevant if LLMs can help you write one faster. If you're only using HTMX to avoid JS, I don't see how LLMs discourage you from doing that. Wouldn't it be better to vibecode something you have an easier time reading than vibecode a language you don't even understand enough to use? What are you going to do if it blows up?
KPGv2 11 hours ago
vb-8448 11 hours ago
I'd expect it to be the other way around: LLMs will increase HTMX(and similar solutions) adoption because alongside of being excellent at writing HTMX there are also excellent writing web components.
React, vue and similar still have their use case, but htmx + web components can drive you really far.
gregwebs 11 hours ago
The advantage for the LLM is the same for humans. With the right abstractions, code can be written quicker and more robustly.
To get more hands off with LLMS you really want to have a lot of engineering rigor. A big part of that is a focus on tests. If your abstractions make testing easier, your results will be a lot better. For Javascript the more you can test logic without DOM manipulation and without playwright tests, the better.
I found LLMs to be default to and be pretty good at working with HTMX, but not great (mostly lots of state synchronization issues). The focus on DOM markup of HTMX does not lend itself well to simplifying testing. I don't claim to be an expert at HTMX, but I don't see a separate section on testing in their documentation.
I am trying out the foldkit framework because it makes a lot more testable outside the DOM. Its probably too heavy weight for most humans (and for simple apps- it only seems appropriate for client-side apps), but I will see how well LLMs can work with it.
Fervicus 10 hours ago
You mean generate unmaintainable JavaScript for us.
razemio 9 hours ago
I let the llm write components which are independent to each other. This works great and keeps everything clean. The times that llm would only generate unmaintainable code are long gone with OPUS, Fable and sol 5.6
replwoacause 2 hours ago
dgabriel 9 hours ago
replwoacause 2 hours ago
mi_lk 5 hours ago
avarun 13 hours ago
_doctor_love 12 hours ago
gwking 12 hours ago
recursivedoubts 11 hours ago
MichaelNolan 12 hours ago
SoKamil 8 hours ago
kayson 12 hours ago
aaronbrethorst 12 hours ago
recursivedoubts 12 hours ago
Capricorn2481 12 hours ago
tflinton 5 hours ago
cui 10 hours ago
hollowturtle 9 hours ago
jamesforestwest 9 hours ago
flossly 12 hours ago
Nonetheless I hope all who do use Htmx, enjoy using it.
anamexis 11 hours ago
hackingonempty 11 hours ago