---
title: "Another Real World React -> htmx Port"
description: "In this article, Carson Gross summarizes a real-world case study of Adrian McPhee porting the OpenUnited platform from React to htmx, documenting significant reductions in code complexity and development time while highlighting how content-focused web applications can benefit from a hypermedia architectural approach."
created: 2023-09-20
modified: 2023-09-20
authors: ["Carson Gross"]
tags: ["case-studies"]
---

import { Image } from 'astro:assets';
import openUnitedBeforeAfter from '../../assets/img/open-united-before-after-htmx.png';

The [Mother of All htmx Demos](/essays/a-real-world-react-to-htmx-port) you can see the real world results of a
port from a React-based front end to an htmx-powered front end. The results are very good, although we qualify the
experience with the following:

> These are eye-popping numbers, and they reflect the fact that the Contexte application is extremely amenable to
> hypermedia: it is a content-focused application that shows lots of text and images. We would not expect every
> web application to see these sorts of numbers.
>
> However, we _would_ expect _many_ applications to see dramatic improvements by adopting the hypermedia/htmx approach,
> at
> least for part of their system.

As luck would have it, we have another application (again, based on Django on the server side) that has been ported from
a React front end to an htmx front end: [OpenUnited](https://openunited.com/).

Here is a graphic from
the [original LinkedIn post](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7109116330770878464/)
by Adrian McPhee, showing the total Lines of Code in the code base before and after the port:

<Image src={openUnitedBeforeAfter} alt="Open United before and after htmx port comparison" />

### Before/After Source Code

A very nice aspect of this port is that, because OpenUnited is open source, in contrast with Contexte, the before and
after code is available to examine:

Before: https://github.com/OpenUnited/old-codebase

After: https://github.com/OpenUnited/platform

## Executive Summary

Here is a high-level summary of the port

* They reduced the **code base size** by **61%** (31237 LOC to 12044 LOC)
* They reduced the **total number of files** by **72%** (588 files to 163 files)
* They reduced the **total number of file types** by **38%** (18 file types to 11 file types)
* Subjectively, development velocity felt at least **5X** faster
* Rather than prototyping in Figma and then porting to HTML, UX development was done directly in HTML

## Analysis

Once again we have some eye-popping results. This is because the OpenUnited application is extremely
amenable to hypermedia: like Contexte, it is a content-focused application that shows lots of text and images.

This experience again demonstrates that, for at least a certain class of web applications, htmx and the hypermedia
architecture can be an excellent choice.
