Show HN: Gomponents, HTML components in pure Go | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Gomponents, HTML components in pure Go

gomponents.com

113 pointsmarkusw41 comments

Hey everyone! I just released v1.0.0 of gomponents last week. It's an HTML component builder in pure Go, with a DSL-like HTML syntax. It's been 4 years in the making, and makes it really easy to build HTML in your web apps.

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Hey all! Sorry for being late to the party. I posted this on HN earlier this week, and only just saw it pop up here. I'll hang around today and try to answer questions and comments. :) I'm in the CEST timezone.

You may also be interested in the "go podcast()" episode I was in earlier this week, talking about gomponents with Dominik: https://gopodcast.dev/episodes/045-gomponent-with-markus-wus...

Similarly, for Templ/Tailwind/AlpineJS components, I’ve recently found https://goilerplate.com.

Nice! Maybe I should build a small adapter so Templ components can be used with gomponents.

So I like the idea of it but am feeling a bit wary about UI elements as runtime types. Good thing about this is the strong typing but then you have a fair bit of lispifying going on which I swing back and forth on. I actually like templ's approach on this (though hate the extra build step). So I finally just settled on plain old go templates. Not quite eloquent but just feels staple and simple. Clearly a lot of get off my lawn type of biases here :)

I agree with you, but I like Gomponents over html templates due to the type safety. It's also easier to reason about with. Some of my html templates can get quite difficult to maintain, with often the context not being obvious.

Totally. I am also in this journey where I keep going back and forth between templates and something typed. I really need something like native jsx inside go. Gosx anybody?

Isn't that basically Templ [0] then? But Templ has that extra build step for preprocessing and converting back to plain Go files.

For me, gomponents is the middle ground. You don't get everything, but quite a lot of JSX-like feel. I was inspired by JSX after all. :) [1] Although I called it GOX back then… :D

[0]: https://templ.guide [1]: https://www.maragu.dk/blog/gomponents-declarative-view-compo...

Yep yep - templ was what i was referring to. But for somereason I was holding back because I wanted my templating to be "format" agnostic where as templ seemed to be tied to html/xml kinda syntax. Big asterix - I have only skimmed through the doc so havent actually seen whether my assumption is wrong. Also I know I am contradicting myself. i guess i didnt settle on templ because I did not want to go all jsx-like but then i also do :facepalm:

I started with html/template, but got fed up with it because I thought it was so hard to pass data around to different components. I don't know, I just didn't jell with it.

are event handlers possible? neither the Github repo nor the linked page showed an example of a button or form submission.

This is basically a HTML templating library. It's server side only. Or do you mean event handlers in the HTML attributes?

If you mean “action=/foo” for a “form” tag, there is an “Action” attribute: https://github.com/maragudk/gomponents/blob/main/html/attrib...

The OG event handler. :D

It looks like this is focused on server rendering HTML, no client-side runtime or anything like that.

I don't see any used of a `Script()` function or similar in the example apps, though you could always chunk some JS in a public directory and link it in the HTML.

They do have a starter example that uses HTMX. That'd be my go-to as well for a tool that's sticking with server rendering HTML.

Yep, this exactly. And the starter kit mentioned is here, for anyone curious: https://github.com/maragudk/gomponents-starter-kit

gomponents is just a glorified string builder, so it's more or less like writing HTML in Go that gets output from the server. So you put event handlers on your elements like you normally would, write scripts and include JS like you normally would, etc.

That said, there's gomponents-htmx [0] for easy integration with HTMX.

[0]: https://github.com/maragudk/gomponents-htmx

This reminds me of Lucky Framework for Crystal

https://luckyframework.org/guides/frontend/rendering-html

I just learned Golang, and i liked your idea, i'm going to test it soon! saved in bookmarks

Cool, good luck! :)

This is a horrifyigly bad idea.

Another horrifyingly bad idea is to make a comment like this without presenting any form of argument.

Awesome, now do it in Haskell!

There are at least two generations of libraries doing that in Haskell. There was blaze-html and then lucid afterwards to fix some monad laws.

There was also was WASH[1] way before blaze.

Given the minimal syntactic overhead and the do-syntax overload/Monad type class, Haskell is a great language to do these embedded DSLs in.

[1] http://www2.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~thiemann/WASH/

I wrote the "Go is my hammer and everything is a nail" post circulating a while back, so unfortunately I can't do that. :D

That’s awesome! I have a very similar project Dovetail, that tries to nudge you into making things accessible.

https://github.com/RoyalIcing/Dovetail

I hadn't seen that one yet, I'll check it out. :-)

Looks cool. There is also Templ[1] that does something similar, though uses codegen.

I wish there is an equivalent of Storybook for these things though, it would be really nice!

[1] https://templ.guide/

What's Storybook? Could you elaborate?

Not the OP but I think he meant the one at https://storybook.js.org

Oooh, that looks cool. Thanks!

While acknowledging the use case of "the designer who doesn't know how to program" and the desirability in some sense of separating logic from data, if I am going to slam together some HTML as a programmer, with no "non-programmer" designer in sight, I tend to slap together a local version of templates like this if I can't find a good one available. The reason is, if I'm going to mix logic and presentation anyhow, why bother with a template library that is basically an inner-platform, when I can just use the programming language itself? Then you get other integrations as useful, e.g., do you have some concept of interfaces/traits/whatever? Define a useful default representation for something and you can push it straight out in a template. This may not work for large UI elements, but in terms of "hey, here's how you display a Username in general" it can be useful, and it's not like you're stuck with only that way of rendering an object.

Closures, modules, functions, loops or recursion, conditionals, every feature of your programming language just right there, without some large templating library in the way. Debug your templates with the actual debugger. Very high performance with just a bit of care in the API design. Every programmer in your language can pick this up very quickly with hardly any effort and doesn't have to learn yet another complete templating language to start using your project, it's just comparable to picking up an API.

So many advantages... it's just... you have to be programmer if you want to modify the resulting code. Other than that, and I guess the fact you need to implement whatever discipline you may want on your own[1]... but those are a total killer in many cases.

[1]: This approach does not require that you mix presentation and logic, but if you want that separation, you will need to discipline yourself to maintain it. Though I have to admit, 25 years of programming on the web and I'm frankly still unconvinced by this argument, or, at least, unconvinced that it is the absolute most important thing in every context and only a cretinous lunatic would dare mix logic and presentation. It seems to me to be a rule espoused by far more people than it is followed by.

I'm really curious whether this will hold true in the future. I think the whole JS/React/JSX ecosystem really got a lot of people over to the programming side from "just" writing HTML and CSS, and I'm wondering whether this could happen for something like Go, too.

Now that the pendulum has swung in favor of rendering HTML server-side again and sprinkling Javascript on top, I sense a lot of interest in different ways of doing things than the default backend + JSON HTTP API + React/Vue frontend stack. And because Go is such a relatively simple language, maybe purely frontend/design-focused developers can pick it up and start writing HTML components with it?

(It helps that my preferred style of putting all HTML components inside a package called "html" inside the Go module/app could neatly containerize newcomers, to not scare them off with all the other stuff that is a Go app.)

Exactly. EDSLs are underrated.

I saw the dot imports and thought “What a neat feature! I wonder why nobody uses it.” Then I googled it and saw a million articles saying how they should be avoided and removed from the language because they make code more difficult to understand.

Typical gophers, can’t accept that there’s a time and place for everything and need to have a hard rule to use that applies to every single situation. Imagine that code, but with gomponents.Ul, gomponents.Li, gomponents.Div everywhere.

Yeah, the dot import made the whole thing click for this library. It’s the only use case I found for it so far though. :D

Fun fact: I got the idea from an episode of the GoTimeFM podcast, where the hosts and guests were discussing features they would like to see removed from the language.

the import is html not gomponents, which imo is fine

It's the same with the Ginkgo testing library: "After the package books_test declaration we import the ginkgo and gomega packages into the test's top-level namespace by performing a . dot-import. Since Ginkgo and Gomega are DSLs this makes the tests more natural to read."

https://onsi.github.io/ginkgo/

> (Some people don't like dot-imports, and luckily it's completely optional.)

You can rename imports to whatever you like, but the default name for the package that contains the HTML elements is `html`, not `gocomponents`.

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