htmx
htmx defines itself as an “extension of HTML”.
It brings a few brilliant ideas:
- any HTML element can initiate an HTTP request (not just forms or links)
- any event can trigger an HTTP request
- you can use all HTTP methods (PUT, DELETE, PATCH) declaratively in addition to GET (forms and links) and POST (available only to forms in HTML)
Those 3 ideas alone are genius.
Then, it allows us to easily overcome the “replace the entire screen” concept, and introduces “replace just this part of the HTML with a snippet of HTML”.
It’s a brilliant little library, with no dependencies, that you install through a script tag. It’s backend-agnostic.
We use htmx to handle client-server HTTP communication once the page is loaded.
So for example the user clicks a link, and we load some data from the server, which we get back as HTML, and we add it to the page dynamically.
And we do this in a way that’s declarative.
Not imperatively writing JavaScript to tell the page what to do, instead, we go up a level of abstraction, and declare what we want it to do.