Help me make the case for Unpoly/ Unpoly 2 against HTMX

[Thiago Majesk Goulart]

Hello everyone!

I used Unpoly 0.X some time ago in a small project and loved the experience - instantly fell in love with the "html over the wire" approach.

Today I have the opportunity to apply this technique again in another project and I'm wondering about Unpoly's advantages over something like HTMX. 

I also have been folowing the progress on Unpoly 2 from the sidelines, but I don't know exactly what has been improved over Unpoly 1 or if the APIs have been freezed with the release candidates - so I'm a little concerned about including it in production right now.

So, could you help me elaborate the pros and cons? I have only done trivial stuff with Unpoly and have no experience with HTMX.

[Fuzen]

Very, very good question. I’m on the same fence. I’ve got an app I want to build that could benefit from Unpoly’s presentation approach (stuff already thought out; the break-out of presentation layers), but yet HTMX is so lean that I can see it being a good overall toolkit to do this and that.

[Peter Wilkinson]

On 25 May 2021, at 7:22 am, Fuzen <hec...@fuzen.co> wrote:

Very, very good question. I’m on the same fence. I’ve got an app I want to build that could benefit from Unpoly’s presentation approach (stuff already thought out; the break-out of presentation layers), but yet HTMX is so lean that I can see it being a good overall toolkit to do this and that.

I’ve built with Intercooler.js before (the predecessor to HTMX and largely the same in approach) and I’ve found Unpoly to be much more ‘natural' to use. It’s hard to describe but although unpoly does more I find that as a developer my interactions with it are much lighter. Having things like layers builtin means that for any app that would use those you are all set whereas with HTMX you definitely need to integrate with something to do that so I found the overall process much simpler.

Basically for me it comes down to that if you need to do anything like what Unpoly can do then you are better off going that way but if you are doing something simpler or you are needing very specific libraries to do interactions then you might be fine with HTMX. 

Peter W

[adam.me...@gmail.com]

I echo what Peter said. I enjoyed intercooler but found Unpoly fit my development style better.

It's really hard to imagine how v2 could improve what was already so good, but I've shipped one of my own apps with the v2 RC and the upgrade from v1 to v2 was smooth with no changes to the markup. I had minimal changes to remove the upgrade shim, and then even added new functionality using the stackable layers. It's working fantastic so far. This is my second smallest app with Unpoly, so it's not the best example, but I'm confident my other apps will be updated in due time without issue.

As far as the stability of the release candidate goes, it's my understanding that its API is finalized and the only remaining work is documentation. Looking through Henning's notes and some of the source code, that seems accurate.

Adam

[Scott Woodall]

I can echo Adam's comments with respect to Intercooler vs Unpoly.

I've also upgraded an application from v1 to v2 and the new layers feature is fantastic. It unlocks for a ton of new flows and I'm glad I took the jump and upgraded. I had to dig through the presentation and docs to piece things together but overall extremely happy with v2.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "unpoly" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to unpoly+un...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/unpoly/4e29b0bb-10e2-4c33-8414-2a78190f5bbdn%40googlegroups.com.

[Fuzen]

Thanks everyone for this valuable feedback. I’m going to go ahead and dig into ver. 2 and see what I can build.

I’ll be looking forward to the official release, also.