blitz VS htmx

Have you talked to the Dioxus people recently?

They're working on a project called Dioxus Blitz; from what I'm told, they're trying to implement a minimal browser target, that provides some basic DOM-like features and renders with wgpu.

It's not exactly what you're hoping for, but you might find common ground.

https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz

(Also, the Linebender project is working on Masonry, with FFI as a medium-term goal.)

Your proposal sounds very similar to what the Dioxus folks are doing on Blitz, which is using HTML/CSS as the languages but doing native rendering. WebF seems much further along, and I know they've been exploring other rendering engines, so it may be an interesting conversation for you to have with them.

Others have already mentioned inlyne and blitz, however given that you're interested in combining web UI with game/wgpu rendering you may be more interested in bevy_ui (and the higher level APIs like bevy_ui_dsl and belly that sit on top of this). Bevy UI is working on a HTML model and is specifically designed to integrate with Bevy's main game renderer and other infrastructure. It's worth noting that a 0.11 release of Bevy of due in next few days, and that UI is going to be a strong focus of the 0.12 release cycle: which should lead to significant development of bevy_ui, and either a doubling down on the "HTML-like UI" approach or a pivot to a new approach.

Here is an example: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/master/examples/buttons.rs

> But no one is saying, "Hey I have a CSS 2.1 compliant rasterizer and compositor that you can use in your C++ or Rust environment!" are they?

There’s actually quite a lot of interesting work going on in that general space, has been in various forms for some years. A couple that immediately spring to mind:

• Azul <https://azul.rs/> builds on WebRender, as used in Firefox. I haven’t looked at it for a few years, but it looks to have grown quite interesting now.

• Blitz <https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz> is based on from-scratch implementations of CSS layout and rendering, and wgpu rendering. It’s not usable yet, but is a very interesting concept. If one happens to be familiar with React Native: it’s kinda like that, or React Native Web.

You may also be interested in https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz which aims to be a full HTML+CSS renderer on top of wgpu (but is currently not nearly as complete as inlyne).

If you are focused on performance we are working on a native renderer for Dioxus called Blitz. It is very incomplete right now, but in the future it will be much more performant than the current webview based approach.

There hasn't been too much progress on Blitz in the last few weeks (it will come), but there is now a new project Freya which is using a Dioxus frontend and rendering with Skia. That's currently using it's own layout system instead of Taffy though.

The main desktop renderer for Dioxus uses wry (the webview tauri uses internally), so the startup time will likely be similar. We are working on a native renderer called blitz which should improve this, but development is still early

HTMX is another library that gained popularity due to its server-first approach to rendering data, although seeking a much simpler way of appealing to developers.

When I work with HTMX I need isolated component that can be reusable a form. So I create a PHP Function that generate the Input Datalist.

I was inspired by htmz (which was in turn inspired by htmx) and how the author got pretty close to a basic htmx-like experience just using an iframe. I wanted to push it a little further so whipped this demo together. My submission demonstrates progressive enhancement for the form - with js enabled the request targets an iframe that is inserted into the dom, meaning the page doesn't actually navigate (similar to event.preventDefault()). The iframe receives the html response from the request and on load triggers a function to swap out it's contents into the main page.

As described on htmx.org: "htmx gives you access to AJAX, CSS Transitions, WebSockets and Server Sent Events directly in HTML, using attributes, so you can build modern user interfaces with the simplicity and power of hypertext"

Apart from the source code itself, the repo's README also gives a bit more details about the various packages I used.

1. htmx: https://htmx.org/

Also, there’s some response header juggling you have to do when submitting forms that have a validation step before redirecting: https://github.com/bigskysoftware/htmx/issues/369

I’ve tried to iron out any footguns or server requirements I’ve bumped into while using HTMX & Hotwire in my projects.

✨ In recent months, I have been developing web projects using GOTTHA stack: Go + Templ + Tailwind CSS + htmx + Alpine.js. As soon as I'm ready to talk about all the subtleties and pitfalls, I'll post it on my social networks.

I've been digging into HTMX lately (using Python web frameworks) and find the concepts and approach to be interesting and promising. The idea of hypermedia driven systems over the current practice of JavaScript based frameworks (I never really got into React, played with Vue, and enjoy Svelte/SvelteKit) and the ability to chose your language/framework for the backend while primarily leveraging HTML/CSS on the frontend just seems refreshing.

Apparently it changed from 2-clause BSD: https://github.com/bigskysoftware/htmx/commit/e16f1865a494b6...

(The zero clause license drops the requirements for preserving the copyright notice when distributing)