You might not need a frontend framework | Afonso Cerejeira

Javascript fadigue is real. As frontend development gets more and more complex, developers are required to learn a wide plethora of languages and tools to bring reactivity to their web apps.

Introducing a SPA framework into a Django project can bring a lot of complexity to the codebase, requiring context switching between two different languages (Python and Javascript) and expertise into a wide set of tools, like node, npm, webpack and babel. Accessibility and SEO can also be affected by the introduction of a SPA architecture.

In this presentation I am going to talk about taking a step back in front-end development and carefully weighting the pros and cons of introducing a Javascript framework into a Django project. I will also show some examples of how to progressively enhance a web page, adding reactivity while maintaining the accessibility. We will explore some libraries like htmx (https://htmx.org/) hotwire (https://hotwire.dev/) and alpinejs (https://github.com/alpinejs/alpine) that can help keeping the frontend light and lean.