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Comment by silentguy | Hacker News Reader

I have used HTMX with Flask and Jinja. It makes the process much simpler to do the frontend development as a backend developer. But I can see its limitations. It's not suitable for anything bigger than a hobby project. Also, it doesn't help with keeping the frontend and the api totally separate. You have to return the html object from API which has its own set of problems.

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> It's not suitable for anything bigger than a hobby project.

This is patently false. It is being used in multiple significant production systems:

https://www.commspace.co.za/

https://zorro.management/

https://www.contexte.com/

https://turboscribe.ai/

and many more. There are times where htmx isn't the right choice, but the idea that its not useful for anything more than a hobby project is simply false.

The middle 2 links are by solo developers - I wouldn't call those significant production systems. Generally tools like React are helpful for managing complexity across large systems where nobody understands the whole app and layers of of features, bug fixes and optimizations have been baked in over the years and nobody understands the whole app anymore

The reason "nobody understands the app anymore" is due to the complexity of React and not the application.

HTMX tries to reduce the complexity.

No, nobody understands the app because it is simply impossible to hold in your head 5-10 years worth of development by 100+ people across a complex product with complicated use cases and customer need (unless you were there the whole time and you are a very hard worker)

By the time you create the correct abstractions, customer needs and the market will have changed and thus your abstractions are now incorrect

It's both.

Sure, if you have project like facebook then you problably won't get away from complexity, and you NEED a tool to help you manage that.

But at the same time, if you assume you need such tool from the beginning, chances are you will over-complicate your solution and it will become a self fulfilling prophecy of trying to tackle complexity by adding more complexity

contexte is a (small & now full stack, after using react) team:

https://htmx.org/essays/a-real-world-react-to-htmx-port/

To be accurate in the past year we went from 3 to 7 in that team, and I think everyone has been using htmx at least once, and 4 of us are using it on a regular basis.

I would like to know more about these limitations. I haven't used HTMX on more than a hobby project myself.

>You have to return the html object from API which has its own set of problems.

If you mean that HTMX can't consume JSON. Can't you just create a separate end point for JSON responses?

Of course that is possible, but wouldn't that make the project more complex again?

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