10 ms·
Htmx 4.0, the first JavaScript library to release exclusively on the Game Boy
- rpdillon 2mo agoHTMX's whole vibe is amazing. It's good tech, kept simple, useful in gobs of situations, but doesn't take itself too seriously. I've used it in professional and side projects since intercooler.js, and still love it. Here's a crazy unicorn-laser-eyes mug[0] that evokes the vibes of NROL-39[1]. I adore it. [0]: https://swag.htmx.org/collections/octohorse https://swag.htmx.org/collections/octohorse [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-247 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-247
- antihero 2mo agoI was against it for ages but having have claude use it in a simple project and being frankly sick/bored of React, it seems nice.
- Incipient 2mo agoI personally find react overly engineered for my projects - vuejs (+quasar on top) is just great. Granted a little boring perhaps, but it just works, behaves as you'd expect, and doing anything just isn't that difficult.
- bel8 2mo agoQuasar is amazing. But I dislike their Material design components. Would be perfect otherwise.
- no_wizard 2mo agoWish they would decouple styling from everything else. Have a default you can import? Absolutely, that makes sense But styling by default they you have to make complicated overrides for? That’s the part that gets me
- oliwary 2mo agoCan likewise mirror the support for quasar, always the first framework I reach for when starting a new project. The amount of stuff you get for free in terms of setup and content is insane.
- antihero 2mo agoI've just found having TSX on the server and TSX on the client to be a fairly trusty abstraction, and also typesafe way to update the DOM. The thing that is frustrating me about HTMX so far is: How do I build typesafe templates on the server? I'm trying out Aksama and it seems ok, is there something similar for JS? Also the SPA abstraction of "your website is just a client that connects to a an API" is nice.
- yawaramin 2mo agoUse tagged template literals. I wrote about it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48915935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48915935
- arcanemachiner 2mo agoWow, quasar is still around? It seems to be pretty niche, but I've only ever heard good things about it.
- threecheese 2mo agoAny comments on how you’re holding it? Just “Hey Claude use htmx”?
- oaxacaoaxaca 2mo agov4 is in beta and the source has some skills files. And for me personally I'm slowly building my own rules, like not having dialogs live hidden in the main page; instead, every button that triggers a dialog should do so via an htmx call that returns a dialog and appends it to the body. And then setting rules for how Claude should write templates, leveraging Django's new partialdef feature.
- trueno 2mo agoreact based shit lost the plot so hard. i've used it quite a bit, with other beefy but impressive js libs like aggrid and stuff. i'm just tired of client-browser overwork in general that feels like such a mess. having so much of a webapps logic live in the front end feels completely preposterous to me these days. we've only ever needed front end to just.. be the front end. look nice, provide the interface, give people things to click. i very enjoy having all of the behavior determined and defined from the back next to all the code that brings in the data. feels so much more like writing good software. with that im very enjoying the challenge of scaling ssr stuff like this. i am very tempted to throw months of my life away building out a full fledged framework that means no npm / node toolchains, an easier to customize component model thats more performant and doesn't feel like... abstractions of abstractions, compile time tree shakedowns. for all of it. streamlit showed me the beauty of a declarative api that kinda went and did the rest but it missed a ton of marks with its top to bottom runs and it's just awkward.. a little too opinionated, terrible performance, perhaps the dumbest state management ive ever seen in my life... nicegui improved on that, but python just doesn't fit the bill for what i want to do. something that's go and its fully reactive and gives you full control. i genuinely think the hardest part of doing this is designing a framework api that is approachable and easily-rememberable. golang actually makes this hard, python wins with kwargs and stuff. i also suppose i could just start using wasm i think where this might all be headed.. it's a touchy subject if im being honest. our guy at work is an amazing person super candid and honest. he says it kinda hurts seeing the front end stack he's been in pretty much his entire career start to lose developer interest. we've talked in depth about how the entire history of things like react came to be out of necessity, a product of its time with all the historic constraints that used to exist.. it led to educational curriculums, bootcamps and full blown careers.. but it's really hard to get behind what feels like an overly complex workaround that spans well over a decade at this point. people have invested a lot in their frontend-frameworks and toolchains and workflows and other pieces of knowledge and understandably are ready to defend it the entire existence of "make the client browser do a lot of work work" model. but hey, I've used both heavily and for what it's worth I think server-side and a general programming language are really the path forward here and it feels like something that corrects one of computing histories biggest weird sidequests. i genuinely think everyone will have a deeper and better understanding of computing in general approaching from this angle, and i think ssr is a very valuable path to explore that can really open the doors to understanding what makes good software as you're forced to contend with the most important design pattern: if you're going to make the server do most of the work, what is needed to do it well & scale to many clients. it naturally leads you into some really exciting possibilities. i personally love where this is headed because it completely nerfs the need for such abominations such as graphql & it's supporting infra. i can just rawdog sql, the most goated query language of all time. highly performant data grids imo are the gold standard of components. i'm okay with a blend of client and server side work to make this a reality, aggrid is a good example of a very sick front end lib that does this. but i look forward to seeing if anyone's going to do something new here that is performant as hell and served up from the backend, some kind of tanstack demonchild or satanic wasm data grid 9000
- all2 2mo agoThe nrol 39 mission patch is one of my favorites. You should find the authorizing docs for that patch and read the hand written notes. They're hilarious.
- dfaoidsoi 2mo ago[dead]
- recursivedoubts 2mo agohello all, we are releasing htmx 4.0 on the Game Boy and Gameboy Color (thank you rcy for submitting) it is a real, honest-to-goodness mario-bros inspired GameBoy game with four levels over three biomes ending in a slop factory where you battle final boss warren buffering (an online character I beef with, we are friends) if you beat him it unlocks the source code for htmx 4.0 game was written by Stephen Mitchell (aka scum) by hand, using GBStudio w/heavy customizations, hoping to get an essay by him up soon talking about the creation of the game carts were produced w/the expertise of Jarason Banes who also did the cover design. Cover art is by Ash (https://www.fiverr.com/ae1996/ https://www.fiverr.com/ae1996/) who also did the soft-cover art for https://hypermedia.systems https://hypermedia.systems Hope you find it enjoyable if you get a copy and at least find it funny if you don't :)
- WD-42 2mo agoWait but where do we get a gameboy?
- recursivedoubts 2mo agomodretro has new ones https://modretro.com/products/chromatic-tetris-bundle https://modretro.com/products/chromatic-tetris-bundle you can find cheaper ones on amazon/temu too
- scumdude 2mo agoThe Chromatic is an awesome experience to play. The HTMX 4 game has an auto-loader which immediately drops you into the game at your last checkpoint. Since the Chromatic has no boot screen, you're back in play within a second of powering on the system.
- WD-42 2mo agoDo they license from Nintendo or something? I thought this kind of stuff was lawyer bait.
- Klonoar 2mo ago
- blister 2mo agoI've been using htmx for three years now, and it's completely unlocked new ways of building software for the web, especially if you use a server-side templating language. But more importantly (as this "Game Boy" option reveals), the head honcho is really responsive with the items in the store. I had purchased a coffee mug a few years back and complained on Twitter that they need to sell larger mugs instead of only offering little tiny baby mugs that only hold ~8 ounces of liquid. The next day, he added giant 48-ounce monsters to the store and I've been drinking out of that mug every day since.
- scumdude 2mo agoTell me about it. I made a joke about the store selling 'Complexity Bad' onesies, and he started selling them later that day. https://x.com/scumitchell/status/1886825775560528069?s=20 https://x.com/scumitchell/status/1886825775560528069?s=20
- Induane 2mo agoThat's amazing!
- inigyou 2mo agoThis implies it's all dropshipped print-on-demand, of course. Which is fine if you're just considering it a donation incentive rather than a worthwhile product in its own right.
- cure_42 2mo agoYeah I had the same thought. I was vaguely interested before, but I have no desire to own more garbage
- randallsquared 2mo agoTo be clear, making clothing is not actually their business.
- 2mo ago
- throw2ih020 2mo agoHTMX is awesome. I've replaced several OSS web apps on my home server with HTMX + Go + PostgreSQL replacements. The results are lightweight, responsive, work great on desktop and mobile alike, all with the absolute minimum complexity required. The codebases are easy to understand and modify, and so far I'm going months between updates (mostly just minor bugfixes for my applications). I fully expec my mature apps will go years if not decades between required upgrades.
- nicpottier 2mo agoAre any of these open source? I've gone down the go/htmx/pg path lightly a few times and I haven't loved the feel of it, but maybe I'm doing it wrong. I think just server side templating just starts feeling icky in go so maybe I'm just missing a good pattern or library.
- gavmor 2mo agoI just started experimenting with GSX and GSXUI https://github.com/gsxhq/gsxui https://github.com/gsxhq/gsxui https://github.com/jackielii/structpages https://github.com/jackielii/structpages is what I might call a framework that GSX sits nicely in. Also one ai haven't tried: Templ. https://github.com/a-h/templ https://github.com/a-h/templ
- throw2ih020 2mo agoI don't want to ID my account but they basically look like: - OpenAPI API spec and using https://github.com/oapi-codegen/oapi-codegen/ https://github.com/oapi-codegen/oapi-codegen/ to generate the types, server interface, and client library - Standard library http package for the API server implementation - Standard library template/html package for generating the dynamic parts of the webpage content - Static web content is embedded within the Go binary (https://pkg.go.dev/embed https://pkg.go.dev/embed) and served through server routes - api served from /api route, htmx webpage served from / - no ORM, mostly using standard library database/sql package for DB transactions, maybe reaching for a query builder library for more complex queries like complex search functionality - Local S3 compatible object store for dynamic binary data like user-uploaded images and video. Local filesystem can be fine for small scale stuff. For my home server I have authn/authz happening at the OS/infra layer, but if you need multitenancy you can pretty easily integrate an OAuth/OpenID authn/authz middleware for login with Google or whatever.
- inigyou 2mo agoError: Forbidden Your client does not have permission to get URL /en-cad/products/htmx-4-the-game from this server.
- factorialboy 2mo agoIs it true that the person who authored the "Grug-brained developer" essay also created HTMX?
- homarp 2mo agohe wrote the Lulu book
- recursivedoubts 2mo agoyep
- skrebbel 2mo agoand this comment‽
- recursivedoubts 2mo agohow deep does this rabbit hole go?
- felixrieseberg 2mo agoThis is beautiful, the title alone gave me a good chuckle.
- 0gs 2mo agohtmx is so great. i feel like every week i discover some lovely way it helps things run more smoothly
- dizhn 2mo agoThere is one thing I don't like about htmx. It's that they like to use the HATEOAS acronym. It's a bad acronym in every conceivable way.
- bogzz 2mo agoThey HATEOAS because they Hain'tOAS.
- kitd 2mo agoWhy?
- dizhn 2mo ago- Starts with HATE - It's way too long and not catchy. What it refers to is a convoluted long thing too. - This is the killer: it's not so mainstream that everybody knows it. People kind of took "REST" and left the rest. Even REST isn't usually real REST in practice. It just means json api nowadays.
- gen220 2mo agoThank you to the HTMX-folks for keeping software fun! I've been a happy HTMX user and Grug essay forwarder since it first made the rounds here on HN. This was an instant purchase :)
- gawa 2mo agoOoh, I didn't know the creator of htmx was also the author of the Grug Brained Developer! [0][1] TIL. Thanks! Now all the Grug references in the shop make sense, as well as the wisdom and overall vibe of the htmx project :) [0] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2336201/complexity-bad-an-interview-with-carson-gross.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2336201/complexity-bad-an-... [1] https://grugbrain.dev/ https://grugbrain.dev/
- hirvi74 2mo agoWhile I am not particularly a fan of HTMX, I do absolutely adore how Carson and the team always have such a great sense of humor with the project. I used HTMX in a few projects, and the library worked well enough for what I needed, but I found it to be a bit too limiting compared to accomplishing the same task in Vanilla JS (my go-to).
- thrance 2mo ago[flagged]
- scumdude 2mo agorecursivedoubts already mentioned the Cover art is by Ash and included a link to his credentials and portfolio.
- recursivedoubts 2mo agoThe cover art is by ash on fiverr. He also did the cover of hypermedia systems: https://hypermedia.systems https://hypermedia.systems
- jbanes 2mo agoI didn’t do the art, but I did do the graphic design/layout of the box. I can assure you there was no AI used on the box. (Well, except for the CRT effect on the screenshots. ChatGPT helped out there.) I did the work in PhotoPea using the artist’s original work as a base.
- luciana1u 2mo ago[flagged]
- scumdude 2mo agoHow... how did you know?
- nih567 2mo ago[dead]
- wvbdmp 2mo agoI’m amazed at how cheap this is. How is this possible for what I’m assuming is a relatively low-volume physical product? I don’t suppose it’s produced on-demand, but also Carson Gross probably doesn’t have 1000 of these boxes at his home, or I would have seen the pics on twitter.
- recursivedoubts 2mo agowe are selling it pretty cheap we got 1000 made and gave 150 away to Big Sky Dev Conf attendees Not trying to make money on it, it’s for the lols
- xupybd 2mo agoWhy not both?
- recursivedoubts 2mo agoidk just seems like $25 is a good price for a fun game you know?
- jbanes 2mo agoThat’s my doing. I already had a pipeline of contacts for manufacturing GameBoy games at various levels of quality and cost. Being involved from the beginning, I was able to influence development to ensure we could produce the lowest cost product that met the quality levels needed to blow up everyone’s collective minds.
- buildwrangler 2mo agoI made the switch to HTMX recently After 12+ years of building web apps with Javascript and its been nice. I always hated the build complexity of modern Javascript, so much tooling, dependencies and packages to get basic functionality.
- ballon_monkey 2mo agoI love HTMX and use it in a few projects, but its amusing how whats old is new again. .NET Framework / Web Forms had update panels to do partial rendering of web pages back in 2005. Outside of .NET developers it got a lot of hate. But to a certain extent HTMX is a super well refined and more capable version of update panels and more.
- throw2ih020 2mo agoIn a way HTMX is similar to how we used to write websites on LAMP stacks, except with higher quality of life.
- nolok 2mo agoAnd even that was even taking on the solution from c#'s daddy : Delphi IntraWeb suite, all the way back in Delphi 7 and after. This whole concept died because of styling and that era of everyone having their pixel perfect psd turned into a html table or a flash applet and you couldn't reconcile both, but sometime out there you can still find an old IntraWeb business app and you realize they had the components, events and everything figured out long before it became cool again. I always wish for some RAD tool to show up for modern web stack again, but I guess it moves too fast to be worth it, and nowadays front and backend are properly separated disciplines.
- epolanski 2mo agoAfter developing react, angular, Vue frontends for a decade, going back to good old plain server side rendered ruby, elixir, hell even php just feels right. Especially nowadays where AI changes how you interact with ugly languages like php, but benefit from their deep ecosystems, speed and super fast "build" times. In fact, despite me being unable to look at php syntax much without vomiting, and finding languages without proper static types nauseating..I'm just more productive in those than in spa slop land. The web and browser technologies has also moved a lot. The "client side rendering so users don't see a refresh and have an app like experience" is basically a 2010 thing.
- ballon_monkey 2mo ago
- all2 2mo agoAs a side note, anyone is welcome to add 'CEO of HTMX' to their LinkedIn profile. ...I may have done this.
- dzonga 2mo agothis is the counter culture we all live for. well done to the htmx team.
- aarondf 2mo agoI was at Big Sky Dev Con when they unveiled the GameBoy game. I kid you not my jaw dropped. I thought it was some sort of like emulator gimmick until they said "everyone can take a physical cartridge home!" One of the most delightful little swag stunts I've ever seen, and emblematic of the HTMX crew just how much they care about craft and delight in everything they do.
- vkaku 2mo agoThis might be my first new Gameboy Cart in like ever. So looking forward to this HTMX release.
- hollow-moe 2mo agoLove to see new stuff on ancient platforms. Surprised I couldn't find a post about Micro Mages on HN, only comments. https://youtu.be/ZWQ0591PAxM https://youtu.be/ZWQ0591PAxM Spoiler, when the time will come you'll never see something like this on the play station 4.
- zelphirkalt 2mo agoWhat I don't like about Htmx is, that it is still a JS framework, without good automatic fallbacks for a noscript situation. This leads to web devs thinking it would be great to do all the things in Htmx, even if all they have is a static page with static content. Just recently I looked at hosting an old school forum. I don't want to load all the PHP and MySQL baggage on my server or even run it in docker, so I looked for Python solutions. Found PunkwebBB. Was happy for a short time with it, until I tested it more in depth with no scripts. Unfortunately, while it has some good fallbacks in some places, it doesn't have them everywhere and some buttons just don't do anything without JS. It also uses Htmx. Completely unnecessary JS, considering the function of the buttons. I considered forking it. But the amount of work to remove the needless JS, and repair it ... So now I am building my own forum completely without JS, and with Python Django doing a lot of heavy lifting.
- cientifico 2mo agoThis is exactly why I prefer Turbo ( https://turbo.hotwired.dev/ https://turbo.hotwired.dev/ ). Turbo comes from a progressive-enhancement philosophy: start with proper HTML and add richer behaviour on top. HTMX is a JavaScript library in much the same sense that React is. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it makes this anti-pattern easier to fall into. Honestly, “the site should work without JavaScript” is no longer the strongest argument. Server-rendered, semantic HTML matters more for accessibility, SEO, and increasingly for LLMs and other automated tools. Of course, you can write excellent HTML with HTMX. It just requires more discipline—or enough experience to recognize when you are quietly building a JavaScript application in HTML attributes.
- andrewaylett 2mo agoIndeed. And the amusing/disappointing/frustrating thing is: my next.js site works if you turn off JS. Links are server-rendered as links, HTML is server-rendered as HTML. If you visit one of the tools that run on the client then they won't work, but the pages that could be static content? They're static content. Or at least they were, until I started using cache components the other week, and I'd not noticed they'd regressed. That's frustrating. Give me a few minutes...
- andy800 2mo agoAmazing... an HTMX thread without any haters interjecting or critics telling everyone why HTMX wont work. Even React-aholics have to tip their hats to a Game Boy release.
- sroerick 2mo agoCrazy how much things have shifted since a few years ago
- ai_fry_ur_brain 2mo ago[dead]
- Aachen 2mo agoExclusively? Htmx runs in a browser, as people in this thread are attesting with how they've been using it for years
- andy800 2mo agoThe Game Boy contains source code of the upcoming HTMX 4.0
- novoreorx 2mo agoIn the pre agentic coding era, I was hyped about HTMX for providing a classic way of web development over React. But after not writing code for several months, all work done by claude code / codex, I find myself not caring whether the framework is HTMX or React anymore. I mean, why do you bother if you don't write the code yourself. And I'm even starting to feel React's advantages: good ecosystem, rich UI kits, reusable components… these are all where HTMX falls short. I'm surprised to see most people in this thread didn't mention any of these.
- bubblebeard 2mo agoI can understand that feeling, but remember that just because you have been handed a new powertool you mustn't always use it. Life is not about optimizing everything. It makes redundant work faster, where you fully understand from the outset how to write something, but this just frees you up to learn and explore new things, and work on stuff just for the fun of it, like this.
- novoreorx 2mo agoAgreed that life is not about optimizing everything. I do enjoy writing code by hand when the framework or language is delightful to work with， it's just that HTMX isn't that choice for me. The h-attributes model doesn't fit the way I think. Also, my original point was more that once agents write most of the code, "delightful to hand-write" stops being the main criteria for picking a framework.
- yrds96 2mo agoI don't see a relation in this. You can both use LLMs and care about your codebase design. Frameworks and libraries are still relevant, and each one has its tradeoffs.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- asdfsa32 2mo agoIs there any substantial web app written htmx? I find htmx ideal for things that should be static to begin with, and for things that are dynamic, I fail to see how it can handle synchronisation? I believe Github is using similar technology and their notifications indicators and counter are almost always broken and out of sync.
- butterlesstoast 2mo agoI believe Hotwire for Ruby on Rails uses a lot of HTMX under the hood.
- gulugawa 2mo agohttps://htmx.org/essays/paris-2024-olympics-htmx-network-automation/ https://htmx.org/essays/paris-2024-olympics-htmx-network-aut...
- asdfsa32 2mo agoYeah, it is interesting that most people who promote htmx are not "insiders" (for the lack of a better word that isn't loaded like "expert").
- brutella 2mo agoI'm using htmx in the hkknx web app to control smart home accessories. https://hkknx.hochgatterer.me/ https://hkknx.hochgatterer.me/
- asdfsa32 2mo agoAnd it doesn't load, guess what would load just fine? a React app hosted on a cdn.
- gulugawa 2mo agoWhile I prefer to stay with an approach of using web components for my current work, HTMX seems like a good option to consider for future work. I think the design of HTMX acts as a complexity limiter by encouraging less JS. One can make the argument that manually writing JS instead of HTMX would be easier and more maintainable. However, I've found that JS code often trends towards becoming increasingly complex over time. Also, I'm glad to see that htmx can be installed without npm. I think the ability to install npm packages can incentivize too many dependencies.
- yawaramin 2mo agoHtmx can work great with web components.
- bashZorina_09 2mo agoHas or will the ROM be made available for online purchase? Totally understand if it'll be kept cartridge only, the novelty is fantastic haha!
- pelagicAustral 2mo agoI love these guys sense of humor in having a HTMX Sucks line in their inventory with literal nice products, like the Christmas jumper...
- zaydmulani 2mo ago[dead]