MapStruct VS htmx

Currently using .NET and ASP.NET for the API of a project that I'm working on, overall it's a pretty lovely experience, especially with the JetBrains Rider as my IDE. Having worked with Java in the enterprise in the past, it feels like a more focused and sometimes more coherent experience (vs the more decentralized nature of Java), that now thankfully runs fine on Linux as well, don't even need to hope that Mono is good enough anymore.

Entity Framework Core is great, the way how they fetch related data is straightforwards: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/ef/core/querying/related-d...

I also really like the ability to use split queries, when needed: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/ef/core/querying/single-sp...

You can even scaffold your entity mappings from an existing database and manage database migrations separately (which I feel is a must unless you want to pour hours upon hours into learning yet another JPA-like), it's nice when something like that exists in a given ecosystem: https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2022/01/31/entity-framewor...

Some of the stuff in the ecosystem is also really nice, like using ActionBlocks from Dataflow for simple queues and task scheduling is very easy to get started with and pretty pleasant: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.threadin...

Honestly, most of the docs that I've come across are rather pleasant and there's plenty of code examples to be had and even LLMs have enough codebases out there to be trained on and give decent output, in addition to the regular autocomplete in the IDE.

Even some third party stuff like CsvHelper is really well put together: https://joshclose.github.io/CsvHelper/getting-started/#insta...

That said, I've had issues where trying to deserialize incoming JSON requests ([FromBody]) lead to the whole object being null, due to it not matching the fields 1:1 or violating some nullability constraint, however that happened without a clear error message or as much as a warning in the logs, which felt insane and wasn't very discoverable. Now I just use JObject as the parameter and deserialize at the top of the controller method.

I've also run into some ecosystem issues where the OpenAPI codegen was a bit lacking and wouldn't actually generate code that works, but maybe that's because the spec was bad: https://openapi-generator.tech/docs/generators/csharp

I could also not get AutoMapper (https://docs.automapper.org/en/stable/index.html) working satisfactorily, so for now I'm stuck writing mappers by hand with said autocomplete sometimes doing it for me. There were issues with the runtime being unable to register the mappers or something like that, it was a while ago. Overall it felt like the MapStruct library in Java did everything better: https://mapstruct.org/

On the other hand, I haven't had any of the Spring Boot DI related headaches (needing @Lazy sometimes) with ASP.NET, things there seem way more straightforwards and you clearly define whether something should be a Singleton or Scoped and the rest... just gets out of your way and works.

Sadly, there have been very hard to track down cases where I try to do a _dbContext.Add(someEntity) and then when I do a save with just the fields in that one entity changed, the performance absolutely seems to slow down to a crawl. Adding _dbContext.ChangeTracker.AutoDetectChangesEnabled = false seemed to help, but I am still not entirely sure what lead to that behavior, the temp directory on my Linux box also started filling up very rapidly, yet the logs had nothing of use, definitely seems like something I'd need to investigate properly.

Overall, .NET and its ecosystem is pretty good in most cases. And .NET being used in gamedev is also cool, for those who care about that sort of thing, I wonder why jMonkeyEngine never really took off.

In Java (woof..) we have MapStruct (https://mapstruct.org/). Anything like that in Python? I think maybe the Sqlalchemy mapping in Litestar2 is the closest I've seen.

Done right i can look something like mapstruct for example. But like any other feature you need to get a feeling for when it's a good idea to use it.

We are using mapstruct but it sucks when you have protobuf :/

You all beat me to MapStruct and Testcontainers. Honorable mention to RxJava, which I use in Desktop apps.

For the mapping, I'm using Mapstruct, I got the instance example from their examples they use INSTANCE as constant.

Now update your code so that no entities are passed to/from the domain layer and that no objects are passed to/from the domain layer. You'll look at me as though I'm nuts, but you will thank me later. Look at things like http://immutables.github.io/ and https://mapstruct.org/

When my pairing partner and I ran into this use case, we were initially stumped. Even our combined Google Fu efforts were not turning up a good solution. However, we eventually discovered a PR for MapStruct that seemed to be the solution to our issues! But, of course, if it were that simple, I would not be writing this now. The SubClassMapping annotation provided by that PR, while quite helpful, requires specific Mapping annotations for every field on the subclass. We wanted a more elegant solution.

Just use MapStruct...

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)

It would be a sin not to start with something that prides itself on being the front-end library of peace. HTMX skyrocketed in popularity in 2023, gaining most of its GitHub stars during the past year. HTMX is not your average JS framework. If you work in HTMX, you will spend most of your time in the world of hypermedia, looking at web development from a completely different pair of eyes as compared to our usual JS-heavy outlook on modern web development. HTMX leverages the power of the concept of HATEOAS (Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State), enabling developers to access browser features directly from HTML, instead of using Javascript.