Talking Drupal #514 - HTMX

Today we are talking about HTMX, What it is, and why it could be a game changer for Drupal with our guests Shawn Duncan & Carson Gross. We’ll also cover RefreshLess as our module of the week.

For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/514

Topics

• What is HTMX
• HTMX and Drupal Integration
• Community and Contribution
• Discussing HTMX and Its Integration
• HTMX's Stability and Composition
• Programming with HTMX: A Lego-like Experience
• Drupal's HTMX Initiative
• Proof of Concept and Community Involvement
• HTMX's Flexibility and Developer Experience
• Big Pipe and HTMX Integration
• Comparing HTMX with Hotwire Turbo
• Getting Involved with the HTMX Initiative

Resources

• [Plan] Gradually replace Drupal's AJAX system with HTMX
• HTMX in core Proof of Concept
• HTMX contrib module
• HTMX Documentation
• Hypermedia Systems - Carson’s book
• A comparison of Hypermedia Application architecture with Single Page Application. Available for purchase and free online.
• Academic Paper on HTMX
• FACET
• Essays
  • HTMX Sucks
  • Locality of behavior
  • Future of HTMX
• Drupal community initiatives
• Contrast of htmx vs hotwire
• grugbrain
• Primeagen
• Fireship dev

Guests

Shawn Duncan - HTMX intiative fathershawn
Carson Gross - bigsky.software 1cg

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Rich Lawson - richlawson.co rklawson

MOTW

Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to give your Drupal site a more application-like feel, by only reloading parts of the page that need to change? There’s a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • RefreshLess
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Mar 2016 by Wim Leers, but recent releases are by ambient.impact, a fellow Canadian
  • Versions available: 2.0.0-alpha9
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security coverage
  • Test coverage
  • Documentation
  • Number of open issues: 40 open issues, only 2 of which are active bugs against the current branch
• Usage stats:
  • 2 sites
• Module features and usage
  • The RefreshLess module aims to give Drupal sites a smooth, fast, and responsive experience by using Javascript to selectively update the parts of the existing page that need to change, instead of a full page refresh. It uses the HTML5 History API to ensure the browsing behaviour is equivalent, and unsupported browsers will see a standard page refresh instead
  • Using RefreshLess also makes it possible to use transitions (with or without the View Transition API in modern browsers), morphing, and persistent elements to enhance the application-like feel
  • There is some indication that sites may encounter issues if they use RefreshLess with JS aggregation enabled, so it’s probably better to use it if your site has HTTP/2 enabled
  • RefreshLess is currently built on the Turbo library originally built for Ruby on Rails, but there is already an issue open to move the implementation to use HTMX instead