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Show HN: htmgo - build simple and scalable systems with golang + htmx
Hey all, I just wanted to share a project I've been working on for the past month.
After years of heavy frameworks, I really like the idea of using htmx, but it’s a little too low level for me and needs a thin layer above it to facilitate things like components, better syntax with complex JS inside of an attribute, etc
To try and solve this problem with a very minimal stack (golang + htmx) that I've been really enjoying, I'm building this project to cater to my needs and was thinking it would be useful for other developers.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- DLA 2y agoThis is useful! Love the Go & HTMX combination and use it often. Good documentation too for an alpha release. Nice work.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoBeautiful! I don't use Go anymore (moved to Rust) but this looks pristine.
- sureglymop 2y agoI love web dev using rust! I use sveltekit and proxy all requests to /api to a rust backend (though it works with any SSR framework). This is nicely configurable for the vite dev server. Then I basically have all the business logic on the rust side and all the presentation logic on the SSR side to get the best of both worlds. This gives me two things: 1. A development experience with instant visual feedback for the frontend. Even more so when using tailwind. 2. A stable, safe and performant backend. The downside is that a node process has to be running and doing the ssr, though that is an okay trade off for me because my project is mainly the api, having a reference implementation of the frontend is just a nice extra. I've also experimented with implementing the reverse proxy in rust itself and using a unix socket and other IPC mechanisms to push the data to the SSR layer.
- klabb3 2y ago> I love web dev using rust! I use sveltekit and proxy all requests to /api to a rust backend I think this most people would call this backend-, api- or service development. Especially if your api endpoint does not do anything web specific except http. Anyway, how do you share types between the backend and frontend? Are you rawdogging json?
- j45 2y agoRust could probably generate the HTML.
- Prosammer 2y agoI've been playing with loco.rs to do this! Really cool, let's you use htmx or sveltekit (or whatever you want)
- sureglymop 2y agoSounds interesting! Do you have an example project? It seems to be quite opinionated.
- Prosammer 2y agoYeah quite opinionated! I don't have an example project at the moment, but here's a youtube video from loco.rs that someone might find interesting: https://loco.rs/casts/007-htmx/ https://loco.rs/casts/007-htmx/
- sureglymop 2y agoYeah, that makes sense. I've only had fullstack web dev jobs using node, thus the phrasing but you're totally right. I use the ts-rs crate, which adds a derive(TS) macro for types in rust and generates typescript types. It works so far but my side projects are only medium sized. But I'm sure there are other options too.
- OccamsMirror 2y agohtmx + Templ (https://templ.guide/ https://templ.guide/) is something I'm really enjoying as a replacement for React in my personal projects.
- maddalax 2y agoI do also like the idea behind templ, only issue is when I tried to use it, the DX was pretty poor on Jetbrains IDE’s. I think the LSP is broken for it
- chabad360 2y agoThat's actually something I've been slowly working on. There's a bug in the go parser tho that kinda slowed things down a lot.
- kosmozaut 2y agoI'm kind of in the same boat (but with VSCode). In addition to that, I found that it didn't make things too much easier than something like MVC with built-in template/html. The context integration seems like a huge footgun, since it just panics if you access a value that doesn't exist.
- jonathrg 2y agoThere is definitely a problem with the LSP. I've resorted to turning off the templ extension in VS Code, syntax highlighting and all.
- sublinear 2y ago"Scalable", but does it scale in terms of business requirements typical of web projects?
- tanduv 2y agoThe example TODO app doesn't seem to be doing so well https://todo-example.htmgo.dev/ https://todo-example.htmgo.dev/
- maddalax 2y agolol looks like I forgot to limit the user input length, clearing those now…
- winrid 2y agoReminds me of https://j2html.com https://j2html.com Which I have also been starting to use for one project, with quarkus, been a nice experience so far.
- thwg 2y agoj makes me shudder. But thanks for sharing.
- winrid 2y agohaha, to be fair my Java code is more like Go than typical Java. I should probably try Go someday.
- mattgreenrocks 2y agoHave you tried Renarde and Qute?
- winrid 2y agoYes. My concern is the template compilation will get really slow or the custom IDE integration will get out of date and break.
- mattgreenrocks 2y agoIt will suggest a tweak to config if it sees live reload times going past 4s. That seems to help a lot on my 2019 MBP. I hear you on point #2 though. The Red Hat IntelliJ plugin for that seems janky to me. And JetBrains own plugin doesn’t seem great either. In fact I don’t know if I’ve ever seen autocomplete in a Qute template ever. Shame, because the rest of the stack is so damn good.
- winrid 2y ago> It will suggest a tweak to config if it sees live reload times going past 4s No I mean, I can tell it will get slow, haha. > the rest of the stack is so damn good. I agree! (so far, I think)
- anonzzzies 2y agoThese things are really nice and I enjoy using them very much, but we depend now so much on shadcn and ready made templates on top of that; almost all of those are react (and next). The world needs far more open source (fully, not those 'pay to a for all the useful components and templates'; not because I don't want to pay, but because of the licensing; we reuse all things internally, so 1-site license etc are just not options) html/tailwind, htmx, htmgo, clog etc templates with components. edit: typo
- hotdang 2y ago[dead]
- anonzzzies 2y agoI find, for a little extra productivity, that liveview [0] even adds a bit more effortless building personally. No plumbing endpoints is great with all written in Go. [0] https://github.com/canopyclimate/golive https://github.com/canopyclimate/golive
- kitd 2y agoLooks nice. I've tried (a couple of times) to build something similar to this, and to OP's project, but it's never worked out. Golive looks the nearest to the ideal in my head.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ocean_moist 2y agoBackend devs rejoice as they can now build dashboards without leaving go.
- 2024user 2y agoWithout touching JavaScript but now you have to type return h.NewPage( h.Div( h.Class("flex gap-2"), h.TextF("the current time is %s", now.String()) ) ) To me that is horrible.
- maddalax 2y agoWell when you put it all on one line it doesn’t look great :) With it properly spaced out and nested, after a few days it started reading exactly like HTML to me, where I can quickly see the hiearchy
- snorremd 2y agoAs a developer who has worked extensively with React and Reagent (a ClojureScript wrapper around React) I actually enjoy this kind of syntax. Better that then some custom HTML templating syntax I need to learn in addition to the language. It doesn't look too bad if one also break the code into multiple functions to make "layouts" and "components". I have had lots of fun building with Bun, ElysiaJS, and HTMX. Might test your go library out as well. Looks pretty neat.
- maddalax 2y agoAwesome, yeah those are pretty nice technologies. Definitely let me know if you do / encounter any issues!
- j45 2y agoEverything doesn't have to be for everyone, and that doesn't make it bad.
- seumars 2y agoHow is htmx low level?
- maddalax 2y agoLow level in the sense that it doesn't have things you would traditionally need to build an application, such as re-usable components, conditional rendering, etc. To do that you have to wire it up with something else such as your backends templating system, alpine, etc.
- smallerfish 2y agoKotlin is a great fit for this - it has an html dsl library called Kotlinx.html, which works alongside HTMX fantastically. And, you can write a kotlinjs frontend chunk for anything additional you need that HTMX isn't a great fit for. I built a framework for my own use that has typesafe routing & SQL. It's a thing of beauty.
- maddalax 2y agothat looks nice, I've enjoyed Kotlin when I used it in the past
- andy800 2y agoKotlin is indeed a great backend to pair with HTMX. However I find jte.gg templating superior to kotlinx.html's awkward syntax. You still benefit from working with native Kotljn objects inside the templates. Check it out!
- jasonlotito 2y agoI remember the days when one of the complaints about PHP was people mixing PHP and HTML together. And no, it was mixing PHP and HTML together. That’s it. Don’t try to tack on anything else to the conversation. And we’ve been going back to it for some time now. This doesn’t even map to HTML naturally! I’m mean fine have fun with your libraries but the amount of excitement for something like this? Amazing.
- novoreorx 2y agoWelp, another fasthtml project. I still don't understand the idea of reinventing HTML in another language. It's too restrictive and will never be as compatible as JSX. Don't get me wrong, I love HTMX, I just don't want to write DSL to generate HTML. IMO a backend language should integrate HTMX similar to how https://hotwired.dev/ https://hotwired.dev/ works.
- bilekas 2y ago> IMO a backend language should integrate HTMX similar to how https://hotwired.dev/ https://hotwired.dev/ works. Turbo stimulus and Strada.. HTMX... Nothing. Just serve it however you feel. In the posts case, they decided to add some tight coupling with go, while not for everyone, is not really a framework. I appreciate go server for really lightweight banal sites or even light services and htmlx is quickly becoming my new favourite markup. I will say this project isn't for me, but casting it as just another 'fasthtml' project is a bit far off the mark.
- imacrayon 2y agoI actually created https://alpine-ajax.js.org https://alpine-ajax.js.org for this reason. HTMX and Hotwire both have opinionated requirements around the content and status codes that your server returns. One of the goals with Alpine AJAX is you should be able to drop it into any basic CRUD app and have it working without changing any server code. HTMX for example requires that a successful form submission respond with a 200 status, but many applications (most?) will 302 redirect to a new page to prevent duplicate form request on refresh.
- maddalax 2y agoThis is very cool, I like the website too
- novoreorx 2y agoI compare this project to FastHTML for two reasons: 1. They both invented a DSL to write HTML in a functional way. 2. They both integrate with HTMX to provide interactivity. This is not a criticism or a metaphor, just an observation of their technical similarities. May I ask if there are any aspects I might be unaware of that make you feel this comparison is inappropriate?
- breadchris 2y agoI love this! I have been working on something similar recently [1] and it is exciting to think about the possibility of building full stack components for the web that are not going to break in the foreseeable future. Even if I need to swap languages/frameworks go is easy to parse and transpile! I dream of a library like ours to take on the likes of React, and to get there the devex needs to have some key features. Most notably, imo, is live reload. You could use air, but I find it still to be too slow to recompile the entire app. I have had some success so far with yaegi to interpret the go at runtime [2]. It isn't perfect, but the full language spec is implemented. My personal goal is to build the Go equivalent of rails/django. Live reloading is needed in addition to plugins that provide web app primitives (auth, storage, logging, metrics, etc). Additionally, I think the network effect of React is a powerful value driver, so some easy way to include React in an app is also important. Thankfully evanw has made this trivial with esbuild [3] [1] https://github.com/breadchris/share/blob/master/html2/html.go https://github.com/breadchris/share/blob/master/html2/html.g... [2] https://github.com/traefik/yaegi https://github.com/traefik/yaegi [3] https://github.com/breadchris/share/blob/master/graph/build.go https://github.com/breadchris/share/blob/master/graph/build....
- maddalax 2y agoHaha we kind of have the same vision. That's eventually what I want to turn htmgo into, something like rails, but as minimal as it can be (essentially plugins, good defaults but you can opt out). > You could use air, but I find it still to be too slow to recompile the entire app. At the moment I'm using fsnotify to watch file changes and restart the process immediately, so far it hasn't been too bad for live reloading. I'm hoping as long as precautions are taken to lazy load things on startup, then it would stay fairly quick.
- hilti 2y ago15 years ago I created a web framework for newLISP. It even ran fast on a Nokia N900 Maybe you want to have a look at the code and get some inspiration. https://github.com/taoeffect/dragonfly-newlisp https://github.com/taoeffect/dragonfly-newlisp
- 2y ago
- politician 2y agoTemplate functions are a better approach, IMO. [1] https://templ.guide/ https://templ.guide/
- TripleChecker 2y agointeresting idea, can it be used with Gin or any other Go web framework - or is that not just the html templating library but a framework on its own? There were a few typos in the docs page: https://triplechecker.com/s/D32t6y/htmgo.dev?v=HrUfl https://triplechecker.com/s/D32t6y/htmgo.dev?v=HrUfl
- maddalax 2y agoAh good call, I should have checked for typos. Will fix, ty. The routing uses the std lib + chi, it's fairly integrated into the html builder because the http request needs to be utilized to check specific htmx headers. I could imagine you could use your own web framework though, since you can wrap the std lib handlers.
- maddalax 2y agoAlso depending on popularity, I may make other adapters for different go web frameworks
- Terretta 2y ago“Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land.” Hand-coding HTML is three decades in, like using computer languages from the 1970s in the 2000s. There are so many of these experiments the last few years, could any be what replaces HTML5? If not, why not? What would be enough better? Most likely not just another form of the same.
- 65 2y agoHas there ever been a widely used open source project for writing HTML as functions inside of another language? (JSX and PHP don't count - you're still writing the HTML markup).
- pmdr 2y agoPhlex (https://phlex.fun https://phlex.fun), but I don't know about the 'widely' part.
- librasteve 2y agoI have been working on a raku module (HTML::Functional) to do this, as with the OP the main motivation is for me to be able to declutter my own projects, so not widely used, but yes OSS. Here is an "Elm-like" example from https://elmprogramming.com/building-a-simple-page-in-elm.html https://elmprogramming.com/building-a-simple-page-in-elm.htm... coded in raku. HTMX is a great lever to put the code on the server - thus Go, Raku, whatever. use HTML::Functional; my $body = body [ div( :class<jumbotron>, [ h1("Welcome to Dunder Mifflin!"), p "Dunder Mifflin Inc. (stock symbol{strong 'DMI'})\n" ~ q:to/END/; is a micro-cap regional paper and office supply distributor with an emphasis on servicing small-business clients. END ]), p :hx-get<https://v2.jokeapi.dev/joke/Any?format=txt&safe-mode>, "Click Me", ]; From the module synopsis which means some of the capabilities of the Raku Quoting Slang are in play ... https://raku.land/zef:librasteve/HTML::Functional https://raku.land/zef:librasteve/HTML::Functional. Raku functions only need parens for disambiguation btw. Named attrs can use the :name<value> syntax which imo is the tidiest.
- eddyg 2y agoRaku is such a great language! It’s a shame it doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Thanks for sharing!
- gwd 2y agoI dunno how widely used it is, but I've found gomponents[1] a big improvement over golang templates with hand-crafted HTML. [1] https://www.gomponents.com/ https://www.gomponents.com/
- bugsense 2y agoFresh air
- pmdfgy 2y agoI'll defintely give it a try when I can but in the meantime I wanted to congratulate and encourage you for the *simple* and yet very practical website presenting the project. It's so rare nowadays that it deserves it.
- jmole 2y agoHow do you handle client side interactivity? I’m probably an outlier, but all the JS I write is client side, and I sure wish I had a typed language to use in development.
- maddalax 2y agoI’m on mobile at the moment so could probably give you a more detailed answer tomorrow, but check out https://htmgo.dev/docs#interactivity-events https://htmgo.dev/docs#interactivity-events