Which other HTML-over-the-wire libraries did you use?

[Thomas Güttler]

Hi unpoly group,

just out of curiosity: Which other HTML-over-the-wire libraries did you use?

Why did you choose unpoly?

What do other libraries do better than unpoly?

[Marcus O]

So far I used Intercooler/HTMX and Turbolinks.

Of course I wish I could pick and choose to have the best of all three :) .

Unpoly has the best out of the box experience for the whole Fragment/Link game (preloading/prefetching links/fragments etc), you get layers out of the box (modals etc) and 3rd party JS is easy to integrate with compilers.

What I miss from Turbolinks, is the (re)loading of page specific CSS/JS. Unpoly wants you to load all JS Styles upfront or you have to load page specific JS (like a Map) with Javascript. Turbolinks keeps track of those additional JS/CSS references. But then you have to write your own mini framework to execute page specific methods. That's basically what Unpoly offers with their compilers. Also, you don't have the page transitions and preloading on hover with Turbolinks out of the box

So I have a project where I lean towards Turbolinks, just because of the page specific asset loading (don't want to rely on JS for that) - but I try to write my scripts so I can swap it out with Unpoly or not use any oof those frameworks.

Intercooler/htmx (the first relies on jQuery) is nice for smaller things where you need some ajax on one page and don't want to touch the legacy JS bundle in a project. Just drop in htmx and add some attributes to the html. Htmx is not as mature as unpoly and as far as I can tell, it has the same problems with page specific assets. But again if you load all scripts and css in one bundle, you don't have to worry about that.

I used Alpine.js a bit, but I think it's not comparable to Unpoly. More to Vue, so I'll leave that out. Curious to read about other peoples experience.

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

I've used Turbolinks and Intercooler, but not since 2013 and 2015 respectively.

Unpoly has the best out of box experience IMHO; form validations, handling of targets below modals, forms in modals, etc. all work extremely well with Unpoly.

I still bring in Stimulus as a dependency in most projects because I personally find Unpoly compilers only work in very narrow cases where a single element is being targeted. Anything more complex and I want the declarative associations from DOM to JavaScript.