pst

Cool project. Love the clean look.

I've been building a frontend with Go, Templ and Datastar for a few months now. I really like the @actions and how the page is updated with the response.

I'm on the fence about signals though. They are fine for simple things like individual text form fields or opening closing a drop-down. But my backend is a Kubernetes style API server. And storing a JSON Kubernetes style resource in a signal does not work because of how Datastar implements parsing the structure into child signals. For me it would be better to just be able to turn this off.

One example where it breaks are K8s labels. They are map[string]string and the key is often hostname prefixed. E.g. example.com/label-key. Datastar can't handle these keys at all and the resulting signals are a mess.

I'm aware that I may be using signals not as intended. But something as simple as data-signals-resource="k8sJson" and then data-bind="resource.metatdata.name" is a great way to work. And it works for metadata name. But it doesn't work if any part of the path needs to be an index in a list or a label key in hostname style.

The other thing I find painful about Datastar signals are the magic about how attributes written something-something in HTML become somethingSomething in JS and all all the snake, camel etc. __modifiers. It's just error prone to work with. Not a great experience.

But overall I still stuck with it so far and am happy with the general idea of HTMX and Alpine functionalities implemented as one and using hypermedia as a general approach. Anything so I can avoid the NodeJS ecosystem really.

When a few RCs back the wire format changed, it was quite a laborious update for me, because using Fiber I can't use the Go SDK and implemented my own. But the wire format clearly changed for the better so it was worth it.

I think the developers are on to something and should keep iterating.

This is awesome. Having a single state for all resources in an environment is critical for keeping all the moving pieces in check and a core design aspect of Kubestack. But the growing state files quickly become a bottleneck. I'm definitely giving this a good test drive. Very excited.

A lot of work that apparently is not valued enough to justify paying for.

You're not wrong. They add miniscule value. But what does that say about the people using these images who are now struggling to replace them?

Everything under internal did discourage me from trying templUI too. What's the reason for it?

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.

But is the icon going to be a syringe, a pill or a tombstone?

Giving teams more insights into their apps at runtime without requiring changes to the apps is as close as one gets to a superpower.

It's funny, as someone proposing frameworks make sense in IaC (Terraform in my case), how the framework/no-framework topic apparently never gets old.

But if you create a configmap to store that label isn't that state? It may be more lightweight than what Terraform or Helm store, but it's still state.