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Ask HN: Experiences w “JS-free” front ends? (Hotwire, Unpoly, Inertia.js, htmlx)

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Re: Ask HN: Experiences w “JS-free” front ends? (Hotwire, Unpoly, Inertia.js, htmlx)

#11

Post by bob1029 »

We've been using Blazor for about 2 years now and it's been a really good ride so far. Server-side mode isn't for every application, but all of our stuff is internal-only so it works perfectly at our scale.

Definitely not "zero" JS, but our JS interop source file is only ~200 lines of code at the moment.

We have some incredibly complicated UI interactions (essentially canvas drawing) which would be a nightmare to synchronize state for. Being able to keep all that state server-side makes it way easier to cope with. Our clients are basically just a dumb terminal on the other side of a websocket.

Re: Ask HN: Experiences w “JS-free” front ends? (Hotwire, Unpoly, Inertia.js, htmlx)

#12

Post by steveryan6989 »

You didn't mention it specifically, but I LOVE developing with Phoenix LiveView. I find that I'm as productive as rails (with rails views), but can get frontend interactivity, easy web socket and Pub Sub setup, and its all built on a much more performant language/framework.

Re: Ask HN: Experiences w “JS-free” front ends? (Hotwire, Unpoly, Inertia.js, htmlx)

#15

Post by bjacobso »

I just started playing with inertia and am pretty impressed. Was able to get it integrated with a rails project (which was already setup with vitejs) pretty easily. Then I can have templates like this: `app/views/welcome/index.ts` and its json is generated by `app/views/welcome/index.json.jbuilder`. Basically vanilla rails but the rendering is done as a react component.

Re: Ask HN: Experiences w “JS-free” front ends? (Hotwire, Unpoly, Inertia.js, htmlx)

#16

Post by SahAssar »

Just talked on a slack about this. I strongly dislike htmx since it creates a DSL where there wasn't one needed. I think in general if you don't need to build custom behavior (which a SPA enables) then going pure SSR (without any of these) is a good way. If you need custom behavior then these solutions probably won't be enough. To me it feels like a very small slice that needs these solutions but still don't need a "more full JS frontend".

An example of the DSL in htmx I mentioned (from https://htmx.org/docs/#validation):
To me this reinvents a subset of js (and compiles it down to js), event handlers, etc. If you just need some inline behavior just use the on* attributes that are in html and if you need more then write a js file and if you need even more use a framework.

Re: Ask HN: Experiences w “JS-free” front ends? (Hotwire, Unpoly, Inertia.js, htmlx)

#17

Post by josefdlange »

SahAssar wrote: post #16

Just talked on a slack about this. I strongly dislike htmx since it creates a DSL where there wasn't one needed. I think in general if you don't need to build custom behavior (which a SPA enables) then going pure SSR (without any of these) is a good way. If you need custom behavior then these solutions probably won't be enough. To me it feels like a very small slice that needs these solutions but still don't need a "…

I think you correctly identify that the typical use case for HTMX is something very narrow. There's a small no-man's-land between a full SPA and an SSR app where you might want to see content moving around without full page flashes, but don't need a lot of complexity/finely-tuned interactivity.

I've used HTMX _alongside_ some more fully-baked JS on our site. There are some particular use cases that are a lot more rapidly accomplished by adding a little `hx-post` and `hx-swap` attribute than writing out the JS itself. It hasn't replaced our usage of vanilla JavaScript or anything, but is a nice lighter-weight dependency that plays nicely with Django templating IMO.

Re: Ask HN: Experiences w “JS-free” front ends? (Hotwire, Unpoly, Inertia.js, htmlx)

#18

Post by josefdlange »

HTMX is a nice utility for a fairly basic set of common JS tasks ("load this content and put it there", "submit this form and show its response there") and I think it's a useful tool to have on a project. Its footprint is small so there's little concern for adding bulk to your bundle.

I don't think it solves every problem efficiently, but as SahAssar mentions (with some thoughtful criticism) below, as your needs become more complex, the framework provides at least some kind of escape hatch into more traditional programming, admittedly strange though it looks embedded as a DSL that gets put into an HTML attribute.

On the other hand there are some cool behaviors that I've leveraged to great success -- in the responses you return from your backend that HTMX is interpreting, you can encode data into headers that HTMX will turn around and trigger as DOM events. Pretty neat way to interact between your front and back-end both on a DOM and a JS runtime level.

Re: Ask HN: Experiences w “JS-free” front ends? (Hotwire, Unpoly, Inertia.js, htmlx)

#19

Post by SahAssar »

josefdlange wrote: post #17
SahAssar wrote: post #16

Just talked on a slack about this. I strongly dislike htmx since it creates a DSL where there wasn't one needed. I think in general if you don't need to build custom behavior (which a SPA enables) then going pure SSR (without any of these) is a good way. If you need custom behavior then these solutions probably won't be enough. To me it feels like a very small slice that needs these solutions but still don't need a "…

I think you correctly identify that the typical use case for HTMX is something very narrow. There's a small no-man's-land between a full SPA and an SSR app where you might want to see content moving around without full page flashes, but don't need a lot of complexity/finely-tuned interactivity. I've used HTMX _alongside_ some more fully-baked JS on our site. There are some particular use cases that are a lot more rap…

The hx-post/swap and similar are pretty small and simple to write for yourself though, so you don't need to include the full suite of htmx. If it was me and I only used those bits I'd probably write them myself or use a library that only focused on those things without the whole DSL.
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