reactor VS imba

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

Imba. The best web programming language ever made.

https://imba.io/

I agree. I was looking for the same thing.

They’re not easy to create but side by side code/result demos like the ones I saw on https://imba.io/ make it very clear on what I’ll be getting into as a developer.

You might get away with Svelte (not Sveltekit) here since it compiles down to javascript. Another fun framework to try out for this might be https://imba.io/, which also has an option to compile things down to pure HTML, CSS & JS (plus it’s very fun to work with).

I've been using Svelte exclusively for the past 3 years or so. I love it and will keep using it as my main solution for interactivity. It's fast to use and execute, produces small apps, and it's extremely economical in how you express components.

The confusion the author expresses with $: reactive statements and store auto subscription with the $ are unwarranted IMO. It's really just a lack of familiarity but this kind of stuff becomes intuitive very quickly.

My criticism of Svelte is rather that they haven't gone deep enough into the compiler-based approach.

Would be great if there were something like .svelteStore files where you had all the automatic reactivity tracking without having to use a component. Or some kind of improvements into writing styles. With a compiler you can do anything you want and I think Svelte has been a bit timid, maybe to not scare people away.

For example Imba[1] also bet on a compiler-based approach (years before Svelte existed) and created their own language/framework/compiler. They have come up with amazing solutions to many problems. It's a shame they bet on Ruby aesthetics though and also that they aren't investing into marketing/docs.

Of course, one might argue that using a compiler is a bad idea for a number of reasons. And yeah of course there are objective issues to any approach, but you have to pick your poison. All in all, Svelte has made me tremendously productive compared to using other solutions for years (React, Vue, Mithril, Inferno, etc).

I will say though that I would rather use a solution that doesn't have any reactivity at all. Mithril and Imba have this concept of just "redrawing the whole thing" like a game GUI without having to worry about reactivity. Cognitively speaking, no reactivity is the best mental model IMO. With any reactive solution, it's very easy to fall into complex reactive dependencies which can be hard to track. The author of Imba has a video from 2018 where he talks about this[2].

[1] https://imba.io/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwoApTLvRdQ

A code snippet showing a simple program right on the home page and "selling" whatever features makes it special would go a long way. It's quite off-putting to have to delve deep into a guide in order to get a feel for a language.

Some examples done right:

https://lfe.io

https://elixir-lang.org

https://imba.io

https://ocaml.org

At the same time, my heart is kind of in the web stuff and I find it a lot more exciting personally so it's hard for me to leave. You can do so much more with web tech and all the new ideas Tcoming from it and the pace it's developing is really . I just don't understand why React is becoming the standard when it's a complete nightmare compared to where we should be. I mean, this is literally insane, especially when things like Svelte exist - or even better, Imba. The day Imba becomes the standard is the day I love web dev again.