09-22, 16:15–16:45 (Europe/Lisbon), Auditorium
We took the plunge and replaced the 2-year-of-work React UI of our SaaS product with simple Django templates and htmx in a couple of months. We’d like to share our experience with you, with concrete indicators on various aspects, and convince your CTO!
🔍 You’ve probably heard of htmx, maybe seen talks about it (maybe even right here last year). Demos are great, potential seems enormous. Maybe you've heard it's great for quick prototyping and tried it.
❓ But what about switching for your real-life project, against everything you’ve heard since 2016 (”modern web interfaces need Javascript-driven webapps”, "the best SaaS products are made of an SPA", etc.)? Does htmx keep its promises? What impact on your product, your team, your business?
✅ That's what we just did at Contexte, by getting rid of the React SPA of a SaaS product. It wasn't a easy decision to make (because the UI holds some fairly complex interactions and we were told such interactions require client-side state management), but it's now such a relief. Maybe if we share our experience the decision would be easier to make for others.
💬 Draft outline of the talk:
- What is Contexte? mainly about our Product/Tech team size and organization
- What is our first SaaS product, Contexte Scan (click here for a Google-translated product presentation)? a quick demo, with an emphasis on the most complex UI elements (I'm not here to sell it to you 😉 )
- Our React UI: bulky, buggy, constantly refactored, dependency hell (quick tour, some figures)
- Our htmx UI: a bit of code here, with examples of how you replace client-side state management with just some htmx-loaded HTML fragments
- Impact on end-users: same UX, better performances
- Impact on the team: faster, fullstack, more agile
- Impact on the planet: smaller footprint on end-users computers
- Conclusion: go for it!
Video: https://youtu.be/3GObi93tjZI