Please just try HTMX

please just try TLS

Everything in that resonated with me.

I worked on a large commercial AlpineJS app and grew to really, really hate it. It's great for smallish projects where the limits of the tool are known, but it is in no way a drop-in replacement for something like React (and I am no fan of React). People like to throw around how easy it is to do basic things, but building a real app using Alpine is an absolute nightmare.

Alpine data objects can grow to be quite large, so you wind up inlining hundreds of lines of JS as strings within your HTML template, which often limits your editor's ability to do JS checks without additional config.

State management in Alpine is implicit and nested and not a serious solution for building commercial apps IMO.

And don't even get me started on unsafe-eval.

If it's your hobby app and you are the developer and the product owner, go for Alpine. If you're working at a company that is asking you to build a competitive web product in 2025, use a more robust tool. Hotwire and Stimulus has scaled much better from an organization standpoint in my experience.

(Disclaimer: I haven't actually run into a case where I had to move from HTMX to a SPA framework, even partially, so this is largely an educated guess)

I think this scenario would either be very apparent early on in the project, or wouldn't actually be that challenging. There are a couple ways you could run into the limits of HTMX:

1. You require purely client side interactivity. The right (IMO) way to use HTMX is as a replacement for sending JSON over the wire and rendering it into HTML on the client, so if your app has features that _wouldn't_ be done that way, you should reach for something else. Fortunately there's lots of solutions to this problem. You can use built in browser features to achieve a lot of the basics now (e.g. the tag means you don't really need custom scripts if you just want an accordion), write simple vanila scripts, or adopt light weight libraries like alpinejs or the creator of HTMX's (only slightly deranged) hyperscript.

2. Maybe your purely client side interactivity needs are complex enough that you do need a SPA framework. At that point you can adopt the islands architecture and create interactive components in your fraemwork of choice, but continue to use hypermedia to communicate with the backend.

3. If you can't easily separate client side state (handled with javascript, potentially with the aid of frameworks) from server state (handled on the server and sent to the client via hypermedia), you can again adopt the islands architecture and have your islands manage their own network requests to the backend.

4. If the above applies to all of your app, then hypermedia/HTMX is a bad fit. But this should generally be pretty obvious early on, because it's about the basic, fundamental nature of the app. You probably know you're building google docs when you start build google docs, not mid-way through.

Same here. Modern angular is pretty nice to work with.

Yes It has a "learning curve" but so does everything (even React).

Also Angular is now about twenty thousand times simpler than it was in the past as you can use Signals for reactivity, and basically ignore Observables for 95% of things.

Angular also removes the a lot of the negatives outlined in the page - no npm, no node_modules, no ecosystem fatigue, no debates on state management etc etc. Everything you need is included in one dependency you can load from a CDN.

I never liked that in react you are mangling the presentation and business logic in one tsx file (separation of concerns? React ignores that lesson for some reason). Htmx feels even worse in this way because now you also have html snippets and templates in your backend code too! Nightmare! Angular let's you leave the templates as standalone files and not mushed into your typescript like react (although you can inline them into the typescript if you want to, but obviously no one does that for anything apart from the most trivial of components)