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).
Django + Postgres on the backend plus a frontend of HTMX + alpine.js for a light touch of interactivity where needed is a killer combination. Claude is very good at it, and with the right instructions actually keeps things concise and modular without spilling into spaghettification. I would recommend this as a first option to anyone looking to spin up a new web stack if you’re not absolutely sure you need the heavyweight of React.
> `hx-alpine-compat` - smooths over compatibility issues between htmx and Alpine.js
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
Before vibe coding was a thing, HTMX made it super easy for me to implement Ajax like features. It was the most approachable library I've ever seen, and I'll always be grateful for it.
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.
Thinking about how well your web architecture will hold up for 100 years (or even 10 years) is bikeshedding and a pointless exercise.
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.
Great library. Really enjoy using it. Agents work really well with the kind of site you build with it and it’s very easy to build. Thanks for the upgrade skills.
I've always been a fan and supporter of HTMX, but lately I've wondered how beneficial it is now that LLMs can generate JavaScript for us. HTMX was especially useful when I wrote JavaScript by hand because I appreciated its higher level of abstraction and simplicity. I also struggled to make it work with AlpineJS and eventually had to resort to plain JavaScript, which gave me finer control. Normally, switching to JavaScript would have been a hassle but since an LLM can produce it as easily as any other text, I’m less clear on HTMX’s advantage. I’ve been getting along fine without it. If computers didn’t write code for us, I would still choose HTMX, but now I find it hard to justify the trade‑off.
By default LLMs will start creating a tangled hard to test mess of javascript. But if you ask them to do TDD they will, and if you give them access to Playwright and have them write playwright tests this can all work.
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.
The main issue HTMX address is reducing complexity and LLMs doesn't solve it.
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.
There's definitely something to this: I expect LLMs to hurt the adoption of htmx and most smaller web libraries. That's fine: it's always been a labor of love and is BSD 0, so I hope the ideas are interesting and that the people who decide to use it enjoy it.
I think, at least for the next few years, certain preferences and consensuses were accidentally embedded in the models to your benefit.
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.
The last time I made a website about a year ago, Gemini used HTMX. It was actually my first experience with HTMX, so in a way, LLMs led to me adopting it. :D
It's hard to answer because I don't personally use HTMX as a way to avoid Javascript. HTMX is a Javascript library. And I don't know if I even find using HTMX easier/harder than writing JS, because they are fundamentally different approaches to building apps. It really just depends on what I'm trying to do.
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?
apologies, i thought you were saying you were switching to SPAs because LLMs understand it better. I see some version of that comment nearly daily now. Carry on!
I'm not very familiar with htmx but at first glance it seems similar to Angular. I thought Angular lost favor because of all the extra attributes and boilerplate. What makes htmx different?
As a joke. Back when 2 came out, they promised there would never be a version 3. I.e., no breaking changes. Then they realized they did need to make a breaking change, so the only way to be true to their promise was to skip version 3.
I'm glad I'm not using this. It's the opposite of how I like to build web apps (which is either SSR with tiny bits of JS on top that I like to use Alpine.js for; or a JS-app that I like to use Elm for as life is too short runtime errors).
Nonetheless I hope all who do use Htmx, enjoy using it.
I would classify HTMX as a different style of "SSR with tiny bits of JS on top." In fact, I would argue it is a more "pure" form of SSR-based interactive web development than an Alpine.js-style approach (I am not making any value judgment here).
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-...
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).
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
"let us rething how extensions can and should work,"
I think you meant rethink here.
For what? Don't leave us hanging!
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4
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.
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.
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.
You mean generate unmaintainable JavaScript for us.
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.
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.
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?
That doesn't mean do dumb / complicated / bloated stuff for no reason. If the best thing for your users is static html, use that.
https://hypermedia.systems/hypermedia-a-reintroduction/
Nonetheless I hope all who do use Htmx, enjoy using it.
Looks like some copy is missing here
Typo of "a"?