I’ve not tried Datastar in anger but I have tried HTMX after all the hype and it quickly became unmaintainable.
My dream was having a Go server churning out all this hypermedia and I could swerve using a frontend framework, but I quickly found the Go code I was writing was rigid and convoluted. It just wasn’t nice. In fact it’s the only time I’ve had an evening coding session and forgotten what the code was doing on the same evening I started.
I’m having a completely opposite experience with Elixir and Phoenix. That feels like an end to end fluid experience without excessive cognitive load.
BEAM + Elixir + Phoenix feels like I can control a whole system from the CPU processes (almost) up to the UI elements on a remote user’s screen, all in one easy-ish-to-understand system and language.
Granted, I’ve only used it for smaller projects, but I can almost feel my brain relax as the JS fades out, and suddenly making web apps is super fun again.
html/template blocks are not as ergonomic. They force you to work on the template level and drill down into the blocks. Templ, Gomponents etc. let you build up the components from smaller pieces, like Lego.
My dream was having a Go server churning out all this hypermedia and I could swerve using a frontend framework, but I quickly found the Go code I was writing was rigid and convoluted. It just wasn’t nice. In fact it’s the only time I’ve had an evening coding session and forgotten what the code was doing on the same evening I started.
I’m having a completely opposite experience with Elixir and Phoenix. That feels like an end to end fluid experience without excessive cognitive load.