Datastar (Real-time Hypermedia Framework) releases v0.13.0

More people are getting into HOWL stacks. Datastar is a single CDN include that gives you the ability to make real-time hypermedia apps with less code and a unified model.

We are starting to get more developers involved and that's wonderful. Datastar's originally intent was to be a plugin framework for creating declarative hypermedia. Seeing more active involvement on Github and Discord has been amazing.

Major changes this release are...

We have TESTS! Pete took on the major effort to integrate Playwright and start writing tests. It's already found regressions and will help make Datastar release more more battle tested going forward.

Plugins are now better about how/when to cleanup on an idiomorph merge. Some were killing themselves and others (like on page load) weren't cleaning up signals completely.

We now support multi-line HTML fragments! This is a problem with the SSE spec. Since we work directly from the event/text-stream primitives we can handle this better. It means easier integration with hand written HTML and native support for formats like CSV within a fragment's attributes.

Signal regexp could have issues if calling a function on a signal. data-text="$input.toUpperCase()" would be interpreted as a nested signal instead of a method call, fixed.

data-scroll-into-view got more modifiers about exact placement, animation, and ability to focus the element as well. Led to removal of data-focus as it's redundant.

More examples based off questions from Discord and Github issues.

Delete SSE events no longer need any html fragment.

New $$clipboard action

We have our first plugin developed by another! Thanks Patrick for his work on data-fetch-signal plugin and $isLoading signal.

A Haskell back-end example was provided by Henry. It's great to see as many back-end example as possible!

Redirect simplification

Deleting an element was flaky and is fixed with tests

If you start getting into more complicated UIs where fine-grain signals and a more robust plugin framework makes sense but want to keep it declarative please give it a try and give us a Github star

basically im on a path to ditch *SPA frameworks altogether and have been evaluating the following:

- Unpoly

- Hotwired

- HTMX/Alpinejs

Now looks like Datastar will need to be explored, i think it has potential but the documentation needs rework, more details should be included in landing page