go-htmx VS maud

Sure. They're called 'partials' sometimes. Useful if you want to rerender just part of a page. This is a pattern used by HTMX, a 'js framework' that accepts fragments of html in an http response and injects it into the page. This is good because it avoids the flash and state loss of a whole page reload. See the HTMX essay on template fragments for a more complete argument [0].

This is a go template for an interactive todos app [1] that I'm experimenting with. The html content of the entire page is present in one template definition which is split into 6 inline {{block}} definitions / "fragments". The page supports 5 interactions indicated by {{define}} definitions, each of which reuse various block fragments relevant to that interaction. I'm in the process of converting it to use embedded cozodb [2] queries which act as a server side data store. The idea here is that the entire 'app', including all html fragments, styles, http requests and responses, db schema, and queries are embedded into this single 100-line file.

[0]: https://htmx.org/essays/template-fragments/

[1]: https://github.com/infogulch/go-htmx/blob/master/templates/t...

[2]: https://github.com/cozodb/cozo

I would like to mention maud in this context:

https://github.com/lambda-fairy/maud

It is refreshingly different from other Rust templating libraries. It uses a proc-macro that compiles your HTML into Rust code. I also happen to use it in conjunction with HTMX and it works very well for me (at least in small projects).

You can also use HTML templating with crates like askama, tera and maud! This can be combined with the power of lightweight JavaScript libraries like htmx to speed up time to production. You can read more about this on our other article about using HTMX with Rust which you can find here.. We also collaborated with Stefan Baumgartner on an article for serving HTML with Askama!

I think a lot of us reach for Jinja-style templates so it feels a little more like we're writing bare HTML. But they're of course still just templates, and they need a build step before they become valid HTML.

So it's true, if you're willing to use a DSL embedded in your server language (like JSX), then you'll have the full language tooling available to you. And this probably isn't giving up much over language-specific templates.

A JSX-equivalent for the Rust server-side rendering world would probably be maud [1] or leptops [2].

[1] https://github.com/lambda-fairy/maud

[2] https://github.com/leptos-rs/leptos

Maud as a performant templating engine that will ensure your templates are well-formed at compile-time and, in effect, minify the generated HTML output by not passing through unnecessary whitespace.

Maud is a fast Slim/Haml-esque templating engine which will automatically minify your HTML at no extra charge because whitespace isn't significant in its syntax.

If you want to do backend development, give actix-web or Axum a try. If you need templating, take a look at Maud and if you want an ORM, take a look at SeaORM.

Personally, I'd recommend Maud if you don't need something with runtime reloading. Not only is it much faster, it implements a template language that is effectively the Rust-syntax equivalent to Slim or Haml using a procedural macro, so you get compile-time verification that your HTML output is well-formed.

For templating, Maud is fast, gives compile-time well-formedness guarantees, and outputs minified HTML by default as a side-effect of it being based on Rust macros. (It's of a similar design philosophy to Slim and Haml)