DjangoCon Europe
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2022–2026
26:46 · 109K views · Oct 15, 2022
David Guillot describes how his team replaced a two-year-old React UI of their SaaS product with Django templates and htmx in a couple of months. The talk gives concrete indicators on code size, performance and team impact.
HN commenters point to it as a real-world case study of moving from React to htmx, especially in threads on boring web development and HTML over the wire.
8 comments from Hacker News
I'm not aware of exactly what you're looking for, but I think such a resource would be very valuable. Unfortunately, modern web development has almost completely eschewed simplicity. I can offer some leads, though. This is more of a manifesto but there is a small movement around simplicity at [LINK] which is written by the guy behind [LINK] -- a nice little way to add the bare minimum JS needed for a 'modern' app. You can find a community of likeminded people at HTMX-adjacent places like their Discord and Twitter. I've also been an advocate of this kind of 'primitive' dev style and it's great to see it gain some popularity. This recent talk from Djangocon "React to htmx on a real-world SaaS product" might be of interest: this video Ironically, the ultra-modern serverless platforms such as Cloudflare Workers have strict size constraints which is leading to a kind of back-to-basics approach that minimizes dependencies and bundle size. You can find a lot of small libraries for this at [LINK] . The latest JS framework to buzz here, Deno's Fresh, even touts "no JS is shipped to the client by default". We can see there is a resurgence of interest in server-side rendering. The classics such as Rails are still alive and kicking. Phoenix seems to be a promising candidate for "the modern Rails". As someone who experienced the Good Old Days of web development, I would recommend at least trying out the managed cloud services for things like databases and cron jobs and deployments. IMO, it's
You can check this talk out this video I was thinking the same but in the video they specifically talk about faceted search and how they did it with htmx. For the second part you probably go with your own javascript or get away with hyperscript
It depends on the usecases & application reqs. There are times when server-rendered content can have enormous benefits over a SPA. Check out this djangocon talk where a SaaS product moved from react to htmx. this video
I think you might find that relevant. (But in short, the author expressed being verry happy with switching to 'stack' you described) this video
I think there's something to it. More important HTMX is just new and different enough that it needs time to be picked up by the industry, BUT indeed it does largely eliminate what is commonly considered strictly front-end work, and thus forces teams to change their composition and division of responsibilities. At least where I worked there was often a frontend vs backend divide where some devs would write backend logic, and some others would worry only about consuming backend APIs to get the UI to do certain thing. The APIs is the contract and interface between the two sides and a natural place to divide responsibilities. Now, with HTMX, the divide is gone. The backend generates and swaps the parts of the UI, effectively driving the UI/UX directly. This cuts tons of JS out of the picture and couples (not necessarily in a bad way) backend and frontend. If you look at a popular YT video: this video , the result of HTMX rewrite was "JS guy left". So in larger teams switching from something like React to HTMX largely turns everything upside down, not just on technical level but on how people work and collaborate. It would be far easier for new teams and projects to go HTMX route, where they can start and keep hiring people who are fine in a new model.