Talk in English - US at PHP Tek 2026
View Slides: https://gamma.app/docs/Modernize-Your-Legacy-Endpoints-wp6s9tgt76rmdgn
Short URL: https://joind.in/talk/775d9
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When I started working in a legacy application, I saw one endpoint that returned HTML instead of JSON and thought "wow, that's old school". Little did I know that HTML responses could be the future to simplify the frontend and backend.
htmx makes things so simple to turn any element on your frontend to send a request to your server, handle anything, and return the HTML you want, even if you are using your framework's templating engine.
htmx simplifies so much of the connection between the frontend and backend. For developers that use PHP, it can remove the need completely of heavy web apps to use a frontend framework that relies on API calls. htmx can keep all of your frontend HTML in your PHP application, without sacrificing modern AJAX style websites
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https://gamma.app/docs/Modernize-Your-Legacy-Endpoints-wp6s9tgt76rmdgn
Good info, but I’m not sure I feel comfortable shifting all the heavy responsibility of everything my legacy app does in jQuery to HTMX. You guys have clearly not seen our jQuery 🤣 I think HTMX suffers from the same problem as Tailwind: sufficiently complex systems are gonna end up with miles-long attributes that are hard to read and understand.
Where I think this WOULD work is simple apps. Simple HTML. Still, I’m going to try it out when i get time, build a sample app. I think I might use a middleware to transform my existing rest API into an HTML response and wish that that doesn’t blow up. Should be fun 🤩