I’m happy to announce the 1.0.0 release of htmx.
htmx is now mature enough that I can recommend it as a general replacement for intercooler.js projects. I don’t think there is a strong reason to port an existing intercooler project to htmx. I have several large intercooler apps and will not be moving them over any time soon. I can, however, recommend using htmx over intercooler for new projects.
htmx is a different sort of javascript library. It is an HTML & hypertext-oriented reply to the current dominance of javascript-based SPA libraries. It is a response to Tom MacWright’s question: “If not SPAs, What?”.
As the homepage says:
<a> and <form> be able to make HTTP requests?click & submit events trigger them?HTML-oriented web development was abandoned not because hypertext was a bad idea, but rather because HTML didn’t have sufficient expressive power. htmx aims to fix that & allows you to implement many common modern web UI patterns using the original hypertext model of the web.
htmx began life as intercooler.js back in 2013.
In april of this year I began work on a jQuery-independent & improved version of intercoolerjs, renamed to htmx. I chose to rename the library because, in working on intercooler, I had come to appreciate that intercooler & htmx were completing HTML as a hypertext rather than just some funky, idiosyncratic javascript libraries.
In May htmx reached 0.0.1. Soon thereafter I had the good fortune of being contacted by Ben Croker who was interested in htmx as a base for his new reactive library, Sprig. Ben was willing to be an early adopter of htmx and pushed the library along much faster than it would have gone otherwise.
I have been very lucky to the have help and feedback from many contributors in GitHub and on Discord. I’d like to thank, in particular, Ben Pate, Robert Schroll & Alejandro Schmeichler for contributing code as well as new ideas and discussions.
I would like to thank Devmode.fm for having me on to talk about htmx and for cleaning up all my “uhhs” and “umms”.
Finally, I would like to thank Justin Sampson, who took a lot of time to explain REST & HATEOAS to me and how intercooler (and now htmx) fit into that model for web development.
Enjoy!