babyapi VS htmx

Now this is the part where I tell you about a library I created, babyapi, and how it makes all of this tedious REST stuff easy!

The availability of app platforms like Acorn and easy-to-use libraries like babyapi take care of the boring and tedious parts of software engineering and let you focus on the things that interest you. Try them out for yourself and let me know what you have any feature requests or issues with babyapi.

All that's left is adding a little style. I won't claim to be a frontend engineer or a UI designer, so I just used UIKit to easily add modern-looking style to the HTML table and buttons. As mentioned throughout the article, the CSS classes and other small details are excluded since they are not directly relevant to the tutorial. See the full example on GitHub to try running it for yourself.

Go is known for being easy to learn and providing the fastest path to production. With HTTP functionality built-in to the standard library, you have everything you need without any external dependencies. The lower-level access to HTTP can be a breath of fresh air if you are accustomed to bloated frameworks, but it results in a lot of boilerplate code which eventually becomes tiring to write over and over. This is where babyapi comes in. I created this library to enable super simple creation of REST APIs without forcing a specific structure on your whole application. It's so easy that a baby could do it!

Hi there! I want to show off a little feature I made using hanami, htmx and a little bit of redis + sidekiq.

Recently, I just rewrite one of my application Stashbin from Next.js to GO. Though my main motivation of this migration was to learn GO and experimenting with HTMX. I also aiming to reduce the resource usage of my application and simplify the deployment process. Initially, Stashbin codebase are split into two seperate repository, one for the frontend that uses Next.js and another for the backend that already uses GO. The backend repository is just a REST API responsible for storing and retreiving data from the database.

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.