I'm working on an application and use Fiber, Templ and Datastar to keep my frontend in Go, like my backend. I'm overall quite happy with this approach.
But Datastar tries to do both, AlpineJS stuff like show/hide dropdow options, as well as HTMX stuff like talk to backend and merge/replace parts of the DOM.
I came across TemplUI a few times while working on this app so far. But always felt the Vanilla JS plus HTMX approach of TemplUI conflicts with Datastar. Too much overlap in different components doing the same stuff for my taste. While at the same time, I spent way too much time converting Tailwind UI components into Tempo. Time I could spend better.
Datastar is quite on the experimental/unstable side of things. And its concept of signals doesn't quite work for my Kubernetes style API resources. So maybe I need to revisit this decision at some point.
What I really like about Datastar and what made me choose it in the first place is how easy it makes using server sent events.
So yeah, exciting times. Still some rough edges I would say. But for me personally I already prefer hypermedia over the predominant React frontends approach.
Mostly for building typed web UIs in Go – instead of using html/template, which isn’t typed and feels oldschool. templ makes Go feel way more modern for frontend work.
I know I am an old angry guy but I really don't want things to 'feel' (not sure what that even is) more modern; I have projects that bring me millions a year which are running for over 2 decades now and this kind of 'modern' is just obsolete next year. I like profit and not being bothered by updates every 5 seconds. I have a simple stack, my saas apps are violently fast and they run for decades without me touching anything but some bugs/features. The modern feel is not required and in fact detrimental to just making bucketloads of business value and company wealth imho. But then again, we never had investors, so I don't know how it feels to burn other people's money.
Yep, that makes sense. I do prefer Go to TS really as I love typesystems but TS types often are completely unreadable. I am a Haskell guy and not entirely sure how they managed to make TS types this line noisy and, frankly, a struggle.
These are weird things to complain about for templ - it’s very boring and stable and it just compiles to very boring Go code while 1) providing type safety for your templates and 2) being less annoying to compose things than template.html.
It definitely doesn’t feel like JSX or any other modern/exciting thing to me.
Why do you say "JSX"? JSX is an HTML templating language for JavaScript. templ looks like an HTML templating language for Go. Every popular web backend language has an HTML templating language... so that it can produce HTML - is it really that surprising?
I recently started using it to make a web frontend for a go backend. This is perfect for that as you can use the same struct definitions and functions from the backend.
I used the icons from templui, but haven't updated since a few weeks when the packages went internal, because you have to install its own cli now for dependency management.
But Datastar tries to do both, AlpineJS stuff like show/hide dropdow options, as well as HTMX stuff like talk to backend and merge/replace parts of the DOM.
I came across TemplUI a few times while working on this app so far. But always felt the Vanilla JS plus HTMX approach of TemplUI conflicts with Datastar. Too much overlap in different components doing the same stuff for my taste. While at the same time, I spent way too much time converting Tailwind UI components into Tempo. Time I could spend better.
Datastar is quite on the experimental/unstable side of things. And its concept of signals doesn't quite work for my Kubernetes style API resources. So maybe I need to revisit this decision at some point.
What I really like about Datastar and what made me choose it in the first place is how easy it makes using server sent events.
So yeah, exciting times. Still some rough edges I would say. But for me personally I already prefer hypermedia over the predominant React frontends approach.
I could've just Googled it sooner, but I was just surprised I couldn't find any reference to the thing it's actually building on/for.
"Templ - Type-safe templating for Go" with a link to templ.guide.
Thanks for the feedback!
It's a language that compiles down to Go and lets you mix HTML-like syntax into your Go code for HTML templating.
https://templ.guide/
You really just paste these 2 lines in your html and that's it:
it's a bit more than 100kb of js, but for prototyping it is very nice.I wish more UI libraries where in the same style. You can always optimize the bundle later.
By “HTMX support” I just mean: the JS logic in components (e.g. tooltips, modals) auto-reinitializes after HTMX swaps.
So you can use components inside HTMX-driven UIs without worrying about broken behavior.
templ’s more for folks who want to stay in Go but need a smoother frontend experience for modern UI needs.
It definitely doesn’t feel like JSX or any other modern/exciting thing to me.
Not a fan of that.
It helps keep things consistent as the library evolves.
But yeah, I get that some folks prefer manual imports – all good!