Modern web development often defaults to heavy client-side frameworks (React/Angular) for CRUD applications, introducing significant architectural overhead and “dependency hell.” By integrating HTMX with ASP.NET Razor Pages, we shifted DOM rendering back to the server, utilizing HTML fragments instead of JSON APIs. This approach eliminated complex client-side state management, reduced custom JavaScript by approximately 85%, and maintained a seamless, single-page application (SPA) feel with minimal infrastructure costs.
The “Failure” of the Modern SPA Forest
Engineers often find themselves trapped in a “forest” of NPM packages, Webpack configurations, and Vite build scripts just to render a simple list or validate a form field. In our initial architectural attempts, using a heavy SPA framework for a standard CRUD application manifested in: