reactor VS intercooler-js

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

An early version of Htmx was in fact based on jQuery (https://intercoolerjs.org).

I used HTMX since the intercooler days [0] but the stuff you can make is rather limited. Also you still need the JS to deal with a11y things like expanded state (or hyperscript, apparently).

If you have a lot of components to implement, everything requires thinking.

I really love it for simple applications though. Resist implementing a complicated menu, live notifications, an editable data-table and such non-web-native things and you can create the fastest CRUD app ever.

And you will need another client, but that's not really an issue if your view model does not contain non-public data (it shouldn't), as you can convert it to JSON at the same endpoint and call it an API.

[0]: https://intercoolerjs.org/

to an extent, there was `jQuery.get` but it wasn't tightly integrated with HTML

the original version of htmx was intercooler.js:

https://intercoolerjs.org

released in 2013, and that version depended on jQuery

You asked for it:

https://htmx.org

https://hyperscript.org

I hated angular when it first came out and couldn't believe what insanity people were willing to come up with, so long as it came from google. (e.g. GWT) I created https://intercoolerjs.org out of frustration with that, and the lack of progress in HTML/hypermedia in general, so I could build a web application I was working on (https://leaddyno.com, since sold).

When covid hit I took a look back at intercooler and decided that it was really two things: HTML++ and a scripting language, so I split it up into htmx, focused just on the hypermedia angle, and hyperscript, the scripting language I wanted for the web (derived from HyperTalk, and old scripting language from HyperCard on the mac).

I know use them both professionally (email me if you want to use them too.)

I created intercooler.js in 2013 so I could do AJAX in HTML:

https://intercoolerjs.org

Last year I removed the jquery dependency and cleaned it up based on a lot of lessons that I learned, renaming it to hmtx:

https://htmx.org

Same idea: extends/complete HTML as a hypertext so you can build more advanced UI within the original hypermedia web model, and cleaner implementation.

Part of that cleanup involved me pulling out some functionality around events and a proto-scripting language (ic-action), and I enjoy programming languages, so I created a front end scripting language to fill that need:

https://hyperscript.org

It's based on HyperTalk and has a lot of domain specific features for lightweight front end scripting, kind of a jQuery or AlpineJS alternative.

This is my experience, and your mileage may vary:

Multiple times in my coding career I have felt stalled and/or like I was regressing.

Early on, I worked on a programming language, gosu (https://gosu-lang.github.io/) which ended up not really going anywhere. Once the work on it was done, I returned to more mundane web programming for a while. A long while after that, and unexpectedly, I turned a jQuery function I was noodling on into intercooler.js (https://intercoolerjs.org/). After a year of that I returned to mundane web programming for quite a while. Unexpectedly, a year ago, the country shut down. I was at home and decided to see if I could remove the jQuery dependency in intercooler.js, and so created htmx (https://htmx.org/). When creating htmx and removing some attribute/functionality, I realized that a small programming language would be the ideal replacement, so I created hyperscript: https://hyperscript.org/. I had not expected to work on a programming language again, but now I am.

So my career has been some very exciting technical projects punctuating long stretches of pretty basic web development, where the most exciting thing is me wondering if I can figure out what the deuce is wrong with my CSS. My takeaway here, at least in my career, is that patience is a virtue, and the interesting stuff tends to come up at irregular intervals and in unexpected moments and ways.

htmx is the successor to intercooler.js. It swaps parts of the page, not the whole page like Turbolinks. htmx allows you to access AJAX, CSS Transitions, WebSockets and Server Sent Events directly in HTML, using attributes, so you can build modern user interfaces with the simplicity and power of hypertext