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DjangoCon 2022 | From React to htmx on a real-world SaaS product: we did it, and it's awesome!

DjangoCon Europe4 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2022–2026
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talk · intermediate · 2022–2026 on HN

David Guillot describes how his team replaced a two-year-old React UI of their SaaS product with Django templates and htmx in a couple of months. The talk gives concrete indicators on code size, performance and team impact.

HN commenters point to it as a real-world case study of moving from React to htmx, especially in threads on boring web development and HTML over the wire.

8 comments from Hacker News

@Xeamek2023-11 · in “HTML First – Six principles for building simple, maintainable, web software”

I think you might find that relevant. (But in short, the author expressed being verry happy with switching to 'stack' you described) ▶ this video

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@dvtkrlbs2023-08 · in “Htmx is part of the GitHub Accelerator”

You can check this talk out ▶ this video I was thinking the same but in the video they specifically talk about faceted search and how they did it with htmx. For the second part you probably go with your own javascript or get away with hyperscript

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@dragonshed2023-02 · in “Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?”

It depends on the usecases & application reqs. There are times when server-rendered content can have enormous benefits over a SPA. Check out this djangocon talk where a SaaS product moved from react to htmx. ▶ this video

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@grose2022-11 · in “Ask HN: Where can one learn about boring web development?”

I'm not aware of exactly what you're looking for, but I think such a resource would be very valuable. Unfortunately, modern web development has almost completely eschewed simplicity. I can offer some leads, though. This is more of a manifesto but there is a small movement around simplicity at link which is written by the guy behind link -- a nice little way to add the bare minimum JS needed for a 'modern' app. You can find a community of likeminded people at HTMX-adjacent places like their Discord and Twitter. I've also been an advocate of this kind of 'primitive' dev style and it's great to see it gain some popularity. This recent talk from Djangocon "React to htmx on a real-world SaaS product" might be of interest: ▶ this video Ironically, the ultra-modern serverless platforms such as Cloudflare Workers have strict size constraints which is leading to a kind of back-to-basics approach that minimizes dependencies and bundle size. You can find a lot of small libraries for this at link . The latest JS framework to buzz here, Deno's Fresh, even touts "no JS is shipped to the client by default". We can see there is a resurgence of interest in server-side rendering. The classics such as Rails are still alive and kicking. Phoenix seems to be a promising candidate for "the modern Rails". As someone who experienced the Good Old Days of web development, I would recommend at least trying out the managed cloud services for things like databases and cron jobs and deployments. IMO, it's

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@dev_l1x_be2026-02 · in “Another GitHub outage in the same day”

> to do great stuff in the name of efficiency; for example, when browsing through some parts of the UI, it's now much more capable of just updating the part of the page that's changed Are you implying that this only doable with React? I mean just for the fun of it you can look at this video: ▶ this video