oxide VS intercooler-js

Sorry about that, it's just a shortcut for https://github.com/fcoury/oxide.

Mostly on MongoDB to PostgreSQL translation server: http://oxidedb.com or https://demo.oxidedb.com.

I have been wanting to dive deep into a Rust project and the challenge of implementing the MongoDB protocol and then translating it into some sort of SQL counterpart was the first thing that really clicked and got me excited enough to get me working on it nonstop for 3 weeks now.

Some backstory:

I have created a product that relies on MongoDB for a document store but doesn’t really need any of the distributed features to really justify having a hosted MongoDB or DocumentDB instance. Now that we’re trying to turn this into a product, we’re seeing that some companies have a little bit of resistance around managing yet another database. Most of our clients already have and manage PostgreSQL in one form or another. I knew that PostgreSQL already offered first class JSON support, but I didn’t want to rewrite the application data layer from scratch if I could avoid it. That’s when I started researching if there was a “proxy” that would translate the MongoDB protocol - that I was completely ignorant about - into PostgreSQL. To my surprise there was nothing ready for production use but I found MangoDB that later on became FerretDB. I delved into the code and was in love with the idea. The team around is really nice, but I found that they had greater ambitions - they basically wanted to offer multiple backends, namely Tigris, on top of PostgreSQL.

On the other hand, I have been waiting to find an excuse to delve deeply into the rust ecosystem but never really found something I was passionate about until I had the idea of challenging myself to see if I could learn about the protocol that MongoDB uses by relying on their public documentation and the hints I found on FerretDB.

Another thing I added to my toolbelt while developing this was about creating parsers. In order to transform MongoDB JSON to SQL queries, I ported an existing library from the MongoDB team from PEG.js to pest.rs!

It’s in very early stages, and it’s work from someone that is not yet super comfortable with the stack so keep in mind this is the beginning of a journey for me that I embarked out of pure joy on getting a tiny bit better on rust and making things click internally.

An early version of Htmx was in fact based on jQuery (https://intercoolerjs.org).

I used HTMX since the intercooler days [0] but the stuff you can make is rather limited. Also you still need the JS to deal with a11y things like expanded state (or hyperscript, apparently).

If you have a lot of components to implement, everything requires thinking.

I really love it for simple applications though. Resist implementing a complicated menu, live notifications, an editable data-table and such non-web-native things and you can create the fastest CRUD app ever.

And you will need another client, but that's not really an issue if your view model does not contain non-public data (it shouldn't), as you can convert it to JSON at the same endpoint and call it an API.

[0]: https://intercoolerjs.org/

to an extent, there was `jQuery.get` but it wasn't tightly integrated with HTML

the original version of htmx was intercooler.js:

https://intercoolerjs.org

released in 2013, and that version depended on jQuery

You asked for it:

https://htmx.org

https://hyperscript.org

I hated angular when it first came out and couldn't believe what insanity people were willing to come up with, so long as it came from google. (e.g. GWT) I created https://intercoolerjs.org out of frustration with that, and the lack of progress in HTML/hypermedia in general, so I could build a web application I was working on (https://leaddyno.com, since sold).

When covid hit I took a look back at intercooler and decided that it was really two things: HTML++ and a scripting language, so I split it up into htmx, focused just on the hypermedia angle, and hyperscript, the scripting language I wanted for the web (derived from HyperTalk, and old scripting language from HyperCard on the mac).

I know use them both professionally (email me if you want to use them too.)

I created intercooler.js in 2013 so I could do AJAX in HTML:

https://intercoolerjs.org

Last year I removed the jquery dependency and cleaned it up based on a lot of lessons that I learned, renaming it to hmtx:

https://htmx.org

Same idea: extends/complete HTML as a hypertext so you can build more advanced UI within the original hypermedia web model, and cleaner implementation.

Part of that cleanup involved me pulling out some functionality around events and a proto-scripting language (ic-action), and I enjoy programming languages, so I created a front end scripting language to fill that need:

https://hyperscript.org

It's based on HyperTalk and has a lot of domain specific features for lightweight front end scripting, kind of a jQuery or AlpineJS alternative.

This is my experience, and your mileage may vary:

Multiple times in my coding career I have felt stalled and/or like I was regressing.

Early on, I worked on a programming language, gosu (https://gosu-lang.github.io/) which ended up not really going anywhere. Once the work on it was done, I returned to more mundane web programming for a while. A long while after that, and unexpectedly, I turned a jQuery function I was noodling on into intercooler.js (https://intercoolerjs.org/). After a year of that I returned to mundane web programming for quite a while. Unexpectedly, a year ago, the country shut down. I was at home and decided to see if I could remove the jQuery dependency in intercooler.js, and so created htmx (https://htmx.org/). When creating htmx and removing some attribute/functionality, I realized that a small programming language would be the ideal replacement, so I created hyperscript: https://hyperscript.org/. I had not expected to work on a programming language again, but now I am.

So my career has been some very exciting technical projects punctuating long stretches of pretty basic web development, where the most exciting thing is me wondering if I can figure out what the deuce is wrong with my CSS. My takeaway here, at least in my career, is that patience is a virtue, and the interesting stuff tends to come up at irregular intervals and in unexpected moments and ways.

htmx is the successor to intercooler.js. It swaps parts of the page, not the whole page like Turbolinks. htmx allows you to access 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