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I moved away from the front-end/React world, but until a couple of years ago, Svelte was the darling and the future of F/E development and now it's htmx. I don

I moved away from the front-end/React world, but until a couple of years ago, Svelte was the darling and the future of F/E development and now it's htmx. I don't want to start another framework flamewar but was it something in particular that people stopped talking about it?

vga805 2y ago
Svelte is great, htmx is great. I don't think the right way to think about it is that one of them is _the_ future of F/E development. One might be getting more attention at the moment but they are both (along with others) useful tools to have in the belt depending on the use case. I recently took over a flask web app. Using htmx with it to get a more snappier SPA feel in certain places was a true joy. Will I use it on a greenfield highly interactive webapp? I'm not sure yet. But it's been nice to discover a new tool that worked really well in a recent project I've taken over. The experience was a really good one so I'm not surprised it's been getting attention lately.
MisterTw22312 2y ago
Hypes come and go. They rarely correlate to the real world usage. Spring, VueJS and Angular are huge, much bigger than HTMX will ever be, but nobody is raving about them. Svelte is still growing. Nothing has happened. React ecosystem is so full of commerce that there're always many voice talking about React. I often think that people praising HTMX are comparing it to React, which is by far the worst of all SPA frameworks. SvelteKit on the other hand is such a succinct yet powerfull all-in-one framework that HTMX (with the required backend with routing and template) appears clunky compared against it. But as I said, most people coming from React and I fully understand why HTMX appears as such a relief. Because it is in those cases.
rogerclark 2y ago
htmx itself is not the future of anything. Businesses are not using htmx to make money and nobody is hiring for htmx. It's an ideological technology rather than a practical one. Maybe it'll inspire something that will turn out to be the future of frontend, but it won't be htmx as it is now.
- recursivedoubts 2y ago
  yeah, well how can you explain the fact that i've made $37 today selling htmx 2.0 on floppies: https://swag.htmx.org/products/floppy https://swag.htmx.org/products/floppy check mate, roger
- c-cube 2y ago
  > nobody is hiring for htmx. It's an ideological technology rather than a practical one. Nobody is "hiring for" json either, or for git. Yet they are in incredibly wide use. The thing is, htmx isn't "the front-end solution" React and co are selling. It's a new component that can be added to any classic/boring server-side stack to help it do more. These stacks are very practical, not "ideological" (lol), they made the web the powerhouse it is today. If anything, the audience of frontend frameworks is Javascript/front-end developers; the audience of htmx includes anyone who can glue together some html and a http server. People who have been using java, or python with django, or C++, or rust, or OCaml on the backend. That's a lot of people even if they're not explicitly hired based on whether they have learned the docs of htmx.

vga805 2y ago

Svelte is great, htmx is great. I don't think the right way to think about it is that one of them is _the_ future of F/E development. One might be getting more attention at the moment but they are both (along with others) useful tools to have in the belt depending on the use case. I recently took over a flask web app. Using htmx with it to get a more snappier SPA feel in certain places was a true joy. Will I use it on a greenfield highly interactive webapp? I'm not sure yet. But it's been nice to discover a new tool that worked really well in a recent project I've taken over. The experience was a really good one so I'm not surprised it's been getting attention lately.

MisterTw22312 2y ago

Hypes come and go. They rarely correlate to the real world usage. Spring, VueJS and Angular are huge, much bigger than HTMX will ever be, but nobody is raving about them. Svelte is still growing. Nothing has happened. React ecosystem is so full of commerce that there're always many voice talking about React. I often think that people praising HTMX are comparing it to React, which is by far the worst of all SPA frameworks. SvelteKit on the other hand is such a succinct yet powerfull all-in-one framework that HTMX (with the required backend with routing and template) appears clunky compared against it. But as I said, most people coming from React and I fully understand why HTMX appears as such a relief. Because it is in those cases.

rogerclark 2y ago

htmx itself is not the future of anything. Businesses are not using htmx to make money and nobody is hiring for htmx. It's an ideological technology rather than a practical one. Maybe it'll inspire something that will turn out to be the future of frontend, but it won't be htmx as it is now.

recursivedoubts 2y ago
yeah, well how can you explain the fact that i've made $37 today selling htmx 2.0 on floppies: https://swag.htmx.org/products/floppy https://swag.htmx.org/products/floppy check mate, roger
c-cube 2y ago
> nobody is hiring for htmx. It's an ideological technology rather than a practical one. Nobody is "hiring for" json either, or for git. Yet they are in incredibly wide use. The thing is, htmx isn't "the front-end solution" React and co are selling. It's a new component that can be added to any classic/boring server-side stack to help it do more. These stacks are very practical, not "ideological" (lol), they made the web the powerhouse it is today. If anything, the audience of frontend frameworks is Javascript/front-end developers; the audience of htmx includes anyone who can glue together some html and a http server. People who have been using java, or python with django, or C++, or rust, or OCaml on the backend. That's a lot of people even if they're not explicitly hired based on whether they have learned the docs of htmx.