htmx: how frontend can be made easy and fun

Leveraging htmx for Dynamic Frontend Interactions

Introduction

As frontend engineers, we are constantly striving to enhance the user experience of web applications. One powerful tool in our arsenal is htmx. In this article, what htmx is and where it does shine.

It’s important to note this library is not intended to replace more robust libraries like React. It does lack:

• Component Ecosystem
• Complex State managment
• Developer tooling
• Community

It’s important to consider the specific needs of your project when choosing a frontend framework or library. React remains a powerful and widely adopted choice for building complex applications with scalability, performance, and an extensive ecosystem in mind.

What is htmx?

htmx, pronounced “hypertext markup extensions,” is a modern JavaScript library that adds AJAX functionality to HTML. It leverages web standards like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to enable the creation of interactive web applications. With htmx, frontend engineers can effortlessly introduce dynamic behavior to HTML elements without the need for complex JavaScript frameworks.

Let’s see how quickly you can get up and running with htmx

<script src="https://unpkg.com/htmx.org@1.9.2"></script>

That is all you need, only a simple script to load the library and you are all good to go.

<!-- have a button POST a click via AJAX -->
<button hx-post="/clicked" hx-swap="outerHTML">
  Click Me
</button>

It gives you access to 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

Key features

Lightweight and Easy to Adopt:

• htmx is lightweight, weighing in at around 7KB when minified and gzipped.
• Simple integration into existing projects, allowing frontend engineers to quickly incorporate its functionality without…