As someone who’s done this for a small project recently; it’s not comparable. The mental overhead and application complexity is significantly lower with htmx. Yes I’d get a better ecosystem and more features with a front end, but do I really need it? Turns out the answer is no, at least for me. In short, with htmx and alpine, the ceiling of what I can achieve is much higher than before. In fact it meets almost 100% of requirements on projects that I’ve worked on in the last 5 years. The few cases where I’d need to opt for something bigger, usually a component or two on particular pages, I’d imagine I could reach for something like Svelte for those components alone.
I find that I’m able to move dramatically faster with this paradigm and able to maintain old codebases as a solo dev with minimal mental overhead. If I’m to give that up, there better be a really good reason. I haven’t come across that situation yet.
> I got them to write some code using HTMX and AlpineJS and watched
I love this. You're making concrete observations about how the use of a technology affects your team.
If you are planning to use both alpine and htmx, why not go one step further and switch completely to Vue?
You will get better ecosystem, more features, better devtools. And it will be relatively simpler.
As someone who’s done this for a small project recently; it’s not comparable. The mental overhead and application complexity is significantly lower with htmx. Yes I’d get a better ecosystem and more features with a front end, but do I really need it? Turns out the answer is no, at least for me. In short, with htmx and alpine, the ceiling of what I can achieve is much higher than before. In fact it meets almost 100% of requirements on projects that I’ve worked on in the last 5 years. The few cases where I’d need to opt for something bigger, usually a component or two on particular pages, I’d imagine I could reach for something like Svelte for those components alone.
I find that I’m able to move dramatically faster with this paradigm and able to maintain old codebases as a solo dev with minimal mental overhead. If I’m to give that up, there better be a really good reason. I haven’t come across that situation yet.
Simplicity? No need for build tools. Work entirely in the HTML or server side code.
You can use Vue without build tools as well