Combining htmx with Bootstrap

Using htmx with Bootstrap is mostly a seamless experience, but I’ve encountered a few places where a bit of extra effort is needed to smooth everything out. Since I could not find a concise description of the required fix, I’ve created this quick post to outline the issue and the remedy.

Bootstrap

Since I work mostly on business-to-business administrative web applications, I need to build many interfaces, yet a slick or custom styling is usually not the highest priority. We need a well rounded set of standard component that enables data presentation with clarity. So let’s just pretend we still live in the ’10s and use Bootstrap. A benefit is that all the scraping-trained AI’s are now all Bootstrap experts, meaning that stamping out entire dashboards is trivial.

Blogs

j2html

For my full-stack projects I like to use Server-Side rendering with Javalin, j2html and htmx. Together, these libraries allow you to write interactive full-stack web applications in vanilla java. In this post I’d like to explain how the j2html library fits in this setup, go over a few benefits, and link a converter that I wrote to make building the user interface easier.

Server Side Rendering

While the last decade was dominated by client-side frameworks, many applications could perhaps have saved a lot of development time by using server-side rendering. This means that the resulting html is built on the server, including its data, styling and behaviour.