Modern web development has been in stuck in a complexity death-spiral for some time. It’s not good for individual devs or the ecosystem as a whole.
But now we have HTMX and AlpineJS.
In this talk I’ll share a bit about how these tools helped me, and the waves they are likely to make.
Once upon a time, if you wanted to have a highly interactive and responsive web application, Django just would not cut it. A common pattern was (and still is) to build a Python backend application to serve some APIs and then build a separate frontend application using some kind of heavy frontend library or framework such as React, Vue, or Svelte.
But now we have HTMX and AlpineJS. And it’s just wonderful.
In this talk, I’ll share my experience of rewriting a React app in HTMX and Alpine. I’ll then talk about why I think adopting tools like these makes a lot of sense for teams, organisations and the community as a whole.