How much of that code and dependency reduction is due to having the entire app to use as a spec? How can you be so sure this new stack won't be "abandoned"? (Vue has received regular updates for 11 years)
Vue 2.x is NOT receiving updates. Not even security updates. Its abandonware.
I had to ask myself if it was worth the hassle to update to 3.x and risk the same thing happening again. The answer was no.
The new stack is Django (which the backend was already written in). Will it stop receiving updates? Extremely unlikely, conserving they have been preserving upgrade paths for the last 20 years and has a solid foundation supporting it.
The supporting ui libraries like htmx and alpine could conceivably become abandoned. The big difference is that they can be vendored easily.
I checked the vue project and it has 1500 transitive dependencies. The new “stack” has a whopping total of 7.
On top of that there is no build step to maintain. Also it’s straight up way faster.
Hey! Whether your son takes over or not, the larger point I was trying to make is that worst case I can vendor htmx.js with my app and keep it going for a long, long time.
Same can’t be said for the vue app and its 1500 dependencies + web pack build chain. At least not as easily.
I haven't done any real web development in over 20 years, but will soon have to build some sort of dynamic web site. I toyed with React 8 or 9 years ago (though never did anything with it, really), and found everything out there to be large and clunky and difficult to work with.
I came across htmx a while back and have kept it in the back of my mind as something to potentially use if I ever had to build something. I'm glad this article came up on HN, and your comment here... makes me really want to build something with htmx!
Not OP, and this was Hotwire Rails with Stimulus but I also saw a similar reduction in moving a page from React to Hotwire. It was actually a new page, with significant changes so couldn't be trumped up to just a rewrite. But this was easily 1/10th if not more of a reduction in LOC than the similar React app it was replacing, with the more features, and a like a 90% increase in performance.
