1. Server-side rendered sites in Python using either Django or FastAPI/Jinja2 and htmx;
2. Dotnet back end with Angular front end.
In practice - for the apps I've been involved with - option (1) provides a more than acceptable user experience. There's no doubt Angular can go beyond the capabilities of SSR+htmx. But, in practice, it's in the long tail. Throw in the odd js lib, e.g. for charting, and option (1) is good enough for the vast majority of things.
The complexity is not comparable: (1) is much simpler. For a start, all logic is in one language. There's no separate build for the front end and back end; no need to reconcile state in a front end cache with the back end. There's no need to export every view as a REST API; it's a native function that gets called from the view handling function.
Others will have different experience: I'm not saying this is universal. But in my experience, objectively, it's not true that the complexity moves from js to htmx. At least, not if that implies the complexity is equivalent. It's just not the case.
To me, htmx isn't as revolutionary as people make it out to be, and possibly that's due to the fact I'm just not burdened by the old days of gigantic Angular apps and massive ASP.Net stacks. My history was mostly JQuery where needed (which was all the time before JS got its act together).
Plus, if it's done right, you can get a lot of functionality while remaining No-JS friendly.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? Front-end framework don't care what language back-end logic is written in. For example, I have a Vue/Vite site that calls back-end functions that I'm gradually migrating from one language to another, and no front-end changes have been required.
Its not a fit for every site or use case but more than any other front-end tool or library or framework, it has enabled me to actually realize the UI concepts in my head to the actual screen, and usually a lot quicker than I'd expect.
This is what I don’t get about HTMX, you can’t give a good experience without client-side JS, sure some developers might love it, but that shouldn’t be the yardstick.
