HTMx has been a revelation for writing web apps. I’d previously used my preferred DERP stack (Django, Ember, REST framework, postgresql) which produced nice enough apps but took a lot of effort and had lots of redundant code: Postgres tables needed to be Django models, which needed to be DRF serialisers, which needed Ember Data models, and then finally rendered to the DOM.
Writing with htmx meant I could have most of the shiny but I only need to produce the html on the server.
htmx’s emphasis on just returning html for me thinking about a simpler way to actually write apps. Having used Django, FastAPI and Starlette, there is a lot of boilerplate required to wire a url up to a template. So I had an attempt at implementing file path routing for Starlette and came up with Dark Star. It worked but didn’t feel that ergonomic.
I was then introduced to Sanic. Sanic has a Flask-like syntax and is fully async. It has an extensions module that makes using jinja templates super easy and many other features that make for a brilliant developer experience. One of its biggest wins is that it ships with a production-grade server: the server you dev on is the server you use in production.
For a different project I was looking at Svelte which led me to Svelte Kit. Svelte Kit allows you to write a whole web app in Svelte, and it makes use of file path routing. So I started work on Sanic-kit. It copies Svelte Kit as much as makes sense to and lets you keep your handler code right next to your templates. When you build your app it translates everything to a “proper” Sanic app (that follows the practices from the Sanic Book as much as possible) and runs it with Sanic’s excellent server.
It’s early days so far but the approach seems sound so I’ll post more updates here as it progresses.