reactor VS django-htmx

I'd love to see this approach make more headway in the Django community. Based on the last DjangoCon it seems like the community is coalescing around HTMX.

This tool does play very nicely with Django's templating engine; you can just have HTMX re-render a particular template block on the server, and send down that updated block. The migration path is quite clean; you just wrap your "HTMX-updated" template block in a `hx-post` div.

Having not gone too deep on HTMX, I'm interested in folks' thoughts on where it's lacking vs. LiveView and Hotwire. One area I can see is performance; Elixir is going to be faster than Django, and so if you're trying to handle high session counts over websockets. But the impression I get is that HTMX is a bit more light-weight, so I'm wondering if there's usecases that can't be met with it vs. LiveView.

Other Django libraries that haven't quite seen as much uptake:

We have https://github.com/edelvalle/reactor, and a port of Hotwire: https://github.com/hotwire-django but both of these don't seem to have much adoption (yet!).

Thank you for posting those, I wanted to post them but I don't comment often (). Wanted to chip in another contemporary: edelvalle/reactor, which is inspired by LiveView[0].

[0]: https://github.com/edelvalle/reactor

I am using Hotwire for a project, and I'm learning Elixir and Phoenix on the side. Finding edelvalle/reactor was immediately helpful to me though, because I cut my teeth on Python/Django, so reading a Python reference implementation helps me learn nuts and bolts of libraries, faster. (so, I figure that this might help someone else grok how these approaches work.)

If this sounds like a barebones version of notable frameworks like Elixir's Phoenix LiveView, Rails's StimulusReflex or Hotwire Turbo, PHP's LiveWire, Django's Reactor... well, you're right! (Bonus: my colleague @jgaskins built a LiveView clone for Crystal)

Reactor

Reactor is a LiveView library for Django. It enables you to do something similar to Phoenix LiveView using Django Channels.

It looks a bit similar to Elixir Live View. Or similar in Django https://github.com/edelvalle/reactor, there are a couple of libraries.

Django does: https://github.com/edelvalle/reactor

If you don't already, you should use django-htmx. This will allow you to check if the request was made with HTMX. You can then do something like this:

To make things easier, install the django-htmx package. Then, in your Page model's serve(), you can do things like if request.htmx: and return an HTML snippet instead of the full page in that case.

The great thing about HTMX is it fits really nicely with templated server-rendered frameworks like Django.

You can have a page with a list of items. The page is one template, and it includes a sub-template which is just the

items. Then you have a separate view for "get list fragment" which just returns the updated/sorted/filtered

. If you toggle the ordering, or filter the list, HTMX will automatically call the fragment renderer and replace just the

items, without reloading the page.

See this example: https://github.com/adamchainz/django-htmx/blob/8054f049f53f0...

This approach solves the common interactivity use-cases requiring JS in a server-rendered app, without having to write any JS, and without having to build a REST API. Instead you just render HTML, which your framework is excellent at.

If you use django-htmx, it's pretty simple to get the "this HTTP request came from HTMX" flag and branch accordingly in your view. The docs give a simple example of the logic here:

https://django-htmx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/middleware.html...

The examples give a fleshed-out version: https://github.com/adamchainz/django-htmx/blob/main/example/...

Though that's very slightly different than how I described it above, but it's basically the same idea; in this case you commonize the `main` block between the two contexts.

HTMX has a HX-Trigger response header that enables you to trigger events in the browser that Javascript code can listen for. Assuming you already have Django-HTMX library set up, you could write a middleware like this:

Nice. I've written some less complete, less consistent variant of this a couple times now. That alone may be worth taking the dependency.

Full URL for django-htmx: https://github.com/adamchainz/django-htmx (creator here)

I think it's fair to clarify that Adam Johnson (aka adamchainz on Reddit and GitHub) didn't create HTMX but did write the django-htmx app to make it easier to use HTMX in Django.

django-htmx also comes with it's own version of HttpResponseHtmxRedirect (called HttpResponseClientRedirect).