The last couple of years seem to have changed everything. Particularly with HTMX, but also related technologies like Alpine.js and Tailwind CSS, we've rapidly gone from a world where seemingly the only option was "API First".
This is the story of bootstrapping a new application in these latter days. On a core of almost old-school Django combined with HTMX, with a just sprinkling of Alpine.js, we've been able to build a rich and interactive web application, with hardly a JSON response or payload in sight.
We'll show the integration patterns we've learnt, and what the limits of those might be.
Finally, we'll look at what the future might bring. As we grow the application we're looking whether we will need edge computing, offline, and richer behaviour purely on the client. Is that the limit of the hypermedia driven approach? Is that where we need an API? It's not clear: it's still very much "API Maybe".
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