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Comment by jonathan-adly | Hacker News Reader

If you are on the fence about using htmx in production. my startup[0] uses it exclusively for our frontend (with like 2 lines of hyperscript. It’s sister library). No complaints and boy, it’s such a fresh breath of increased productivity and still excellent user experience.

We still had to build an API anyway for external organizations using our product, but you still skip a ton of unnecessary JS code.

0. GalenAI.co

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Same, using it for https://findsight.ai (combined with Alpine). Backend is Nim & karax which makes HTML responses a breeze (fragments and full page).

It took me a second to get the hang of it but your app is cool as hell. I recommend everyone click it.

One comment on the UI, on my phone it was not obvious that adding the topic tags was working, because they get added off screen. I was just clicking "ancient-greece" like an idiot for 30 seconds then I accidentally scrolled down and saw what was happening.

Thanks, good feedback.

Echoing another commenter, your app is super cool. Bookmarked.

One UI note, the layout jumping around when typing or clicking on things is a little jarring. E.g., the "Word is too short" message pushes the field the user is typing in down the page.

Great! Yes, all these micro-interactions are something that's on the backlog. I focused on getting the MVP out (it's been here for barely 2 days) and will improve the experience in time.

What's the back-end? Do you generate those HTML responses via a normal template engine, or is there some sort of deeper integration with HTMX on the backend?

It’s Django.. request data in, html response out. That’s all what you need :)

How do you handle template and fragments? any libraries/usage patterns you use to integrate django <-> htmx?

If you're lazy, just develop your django app as usual, and use hx-select attribute to select relevant content to use in htmx. Django doesn't have to be aware of the fact that you're using htmx in the client side.

https://htmx.org/attributes/hx-select/

Awesome, thank you!

Why would it need anything special? Django doesn't care what templates contain. You can have a template with literally anything in it, including HTML fragments.

Usually we have a base template with a content block that a child template can extend. The extend keyword supports variables as well. So we can create a dummy base template, e.g. fragment_base.html, that contains only the content block and if a request is coming from HTMX we set the base template to the dummy one, so the rendered template will contain only the fragment.

I'm asking because I've sort of done this in the past, and find creating fragments of HTML with Django's template engine a bit awkward.

For instance, if I have some sort of utility button, and say I put it in "utility_button.html", a template file. In practice, I might have to supply different actions, or icon names, or colors when the button is generated, which means that each of these potential variable needs to be a template parameter. Adding a class involves some string manipulation magic.

On the other hand, on most client-side front end library, when using a template, I can still slap whatever attributes onto the element, or manipulate its classes as an actual list with relative ease, because front end libraries are more or less already a big HTML parser and generator.

Wish htmx supported WASM - ie instead of sending a request to the server, you send the request to the hosted WASM module and render the response. Ideally, one could then use Rust web-frameworks such as Axum on the client side.

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