Are React, Vue, or even Hotwired still essential for creating modern websites and web applications?
New web projects, even those built using Symfony, tend to be systematically written as Single Page Apps. As a result, they contain a lot of JavaScript code, which often makes them unnecessarily slow and difficult to maintain. Their search engine optimization and indexing by robots powering AI chats can also be greatly degraded.

Thanks to modern CSS, however, the situation has changed: View Transitions and Speculation Rules now make it possible to achieve a UX and a perception of fluidity similar to that offered by the best SPAs, but using a “traditional” approach, without the need for JavaScript or the complexity it introduces.
In concrete terms, this means that it is once again possible to use our favorite framework and its companion Twig for what they excel at: generating server-side HTML, while maintaining excellent UI and UX quality.

During this talk, I will present the architecture of a modern Symfony application that does not depend (or depends very little) on JavaScript and is not an SPA. Then I will introduce a new Symfony UX component that takes advantage of this architecture, the Mercure protocol, and FrankenPHP to offer a feature prized by front-end developers: automatic reloading of views (while preserving states) during development.