I've been building something with HTMX since the last week, I have not done whole lot of complex things with it but I don't think it will pose any problem when time comes.

I get the premise of HTMX and when and why to use it, it's not solution to everything however it is a blessing for backend developers' who wants to work on frontend.

-> A bit of backstory

For my project Daestro[0], which is bit complex (and big) I chose Rust as backend and Svelte (with Sveltekit) as frontend SPA app. This was my first time working on both. After years of working on Django, I wanted to try statically typed language, after some research and trial, I chose Rust. Sveltekit was obvious because it made sense to me compared to other frameworks and it was super easy to pick up.

After working on Sveltekit for a year, I realised I've been spending a lot of time doing these same thing: 1. You create the api on the backend 2. then you create Zod schema on the frontend for form validation 3. the create +page.ts to initialize the form 4. in +page.svelte you create the actual form and validate it there itself with zod before sending it to the server

Hopping over two code bases just for a simple form, and Daestro has a lot of forms. I was just exhausted with this. Then HTMX started to get a lot of traction, I was watching it from a distant but having worked with Django and it's template, I was dismissive of it and thought having separate frontend is best approach.

-> Why I'm leaning towards HTMX now?

- Askama (rust crate) is a template engine which is compile time checked - Askama supports block fragments[1], which is you can render certain part (block) of template, plus for HTMX usage - Askama's macro almost don't make me miss Svelte's components - Rust has amazing type system, now you can just use it, no need to replicate those on Typescript - same codebase, no more hopping - only one binary to deploy (currently for Daestro I've 3 separate deployments)

-> My rules for using HTMX

You must self-impose a set of rules on how you want to use HTMX, otherwise things can get out of you hand and instead of solving a problem you'll create bigger ones. These are my rules:

- Keep your site Multi-page Application and sprinkle some HTMX to make it SPA like on per page basis - make use of hx-target header to only send the block fragments that is required by HTMX (very easy with Askama) - do not create routes with partial page rendering instead a route must render complete page, and then use block framents to render only what is being asked in hx-target - Do not compromise on security[2]

[0]: https://daestro.com [1]: https://askama.readthedocs.io/en/stable/template_syntax.html... [2]: https://htmx.org/docs/#security