Htmx
Ever since I tried Htmx (opens in a new tab), I fell in love with the simplicity and ease with which you can create a webpage when not using JavaScript.
Go (opens in a new tab) is amazing, because it comes with everything you need to write programs.
What do I mean by this? You see, I have been a using JavaScript and Typescript for the past 4 or 5 years now for personal
and work projects. Some of the things you do when you setup a .js or .ts project is:
setup a bundler, transpiler, babel, formatter, testing framework. I thought
this was just how you started projects. Sure, you can use create-react-app or NextJs,
even then they are abstracting more or less the same things for you.
These are just some of the things you need to use, the number of choices and configs you need to think about is insane.
Using Go
When I used go for the first time, I was shocked to see that the language can come
with the tools you need to test, format, build the program. It's easy to read and understand
for someone coming from js land. It comes with static typing, garbage collection and compared
to js insanely fast build and run times. Even if it was just as fast as js or slightly slower
I would still prefer a language that makes it easy for you to write code, format and build it.
I'm not here to argue why JavaScript is better or lesser than Go. Frankly, I couldn't care less. All, I know is that it's 10x easier to write Go than JavaScript.
Htmx
Now, on it's own moving from Node to Go and still having to write the client in a JavaScript
framework would still not make my life that much easier. As I could just use NextJs to do everything.
I've been hearing a lot about Htmx lately and I thought I'd give it a go (pun intended). My best understanding so far is that the browser is a lot more capable now so you could just use plain html to do a lot of the things that I have been using a framework for.
The weird thing was that, I had to unlearn a few things. For instance setting up protected routes
took me a lot longer than it would have, as I hadn't used http cookies for handling sessions before.
Also, since I was dependant on JavaScript to handle things like setting the Authorization header, routing
responses, handling form errors etc. It took me some time to think about what the browser is actually doing.
I'd say this a good thing. If anything, I'm getting a better understanding of what the browser is capable of,
other than just executing JavaScript. Yea, shocker I know!
Creating UI and calling server methods has become significantly fast now. Especially, with the help of code gen AI tools, that can produce html styled with tailwindcss.
So I don't need a Js framework anymore?
I wouldn't negate the use of framework entirely. There could be sections of your web page which might be easier to write with the help of a framework. So, if it gets the job done better, why not use it?
This is funny: Days since Javascript framework (opens in a new tab)
Update on the project
I've set up protected routes, some minor things need fixing (as going to login or sign-up page when logged in). Although, there is a bit of a UI know, I've setup Char.js (opens in a new tab), created the template. Now I can start adding data from the server to the template. It looks, pretty okay too.
