Loopwerk: Building modern Django apps with Alpine AJAX, revisited

About nine months ago I wrote an article about my quest to simplify my web development stack. How I went from SvelteKit on the frontend and Django on the backend, to an all-Django stack for a new project, using Alpine AJAX to enable partial page updates. I’ve now been using this new stack for a while, and my approach -as well as my opinion- has changed significantly. Let’s get into what works, what doesn’t, and where I ended up. A quick recap Alpine AJAX is a lightweight alternative to htmx, which you can use to enhance server-side rendered HTML with a few attributes, turning <a> and <form> tags into AJAX-powered versions. No more full page refreshes when you submit a form. The key mechanic: when a form has x-target="comments", Alpine AJAX submits the form via AJAX, finds the element with that ID in the response, and swaps it into the page. The server returns HTML, not JSON. In the original article I used django-template-partials (since merged into Django itself) to mark se