He shared examples of some immensely dynamic apps that are running on a potato and survived HN, showing that this simplifies things greatly and can scale. Hypermedia-first is a very viable, and simplified, approach.
Surviving, or not surviving, a traffic influx is a backend restriction.
OP is a talented developer that wrote a backend capable of surviving a ton of traffic. Other developers on the internet have written backends that cannot sustain a ton of traffic.
The choice of frontend framework is separate from both. You can write a performant web app that uses React. I’m sure you can write one that falls over immediately with Datastar.
I think for me the key thing is Datastar lets me keep most of my state on the backend, which makes the backend much simpler to write. It also lets me do immediate mode streaming of the HTML, which again is non trivial in something like react without a lot of added complexity.
So it's an enabler in that sense. But, yes it's totally possible to write a backend that falls over with datastar like any technology.
I also agree, that Datastar does benefit from backend experience and if you don't have that experience it can to some extent feel like:
"Draw some circles. Now draw the rest of the Owl".
But I think that the real point that /u/andersmurphy was trying to convey was that hypermedia is VERY performant because immensely talented C++ engineers have optimized precisely this, for decades. The notion that "frontend" devs have that the DOM can and must be managed via JS is simply ridiculous, and is one of the primary things that datastar and hypermedia approaches in general are trying to combat.
In fact, he openly states elsewhere how the sites' backends are actually done in a deliberately dumb, unperformant way, where the backend streams the ENTIRE DOM with each sse message, which gets morphed into the DOM. He could have done something more granular, like streaming only the checkboxes that have changed, but it wasn't at all necessary because the dumb way worked well.
Moreover, the SSE streams benefit from immense compression ratios because somehow the compression window overlaps across messages. Something like 95+%, IIRC.
The idea that UI state should be managed locally is ridiculous now?
Anyway, browsers are built specifically to render HTML. And html/hypermedia is specifically meant to manage and transfer state. The web has lost its way. If you want to read more about this, this free book is a great start: https://hypermedia.systems/book/contents/
Or the essays at HTMX https://htmx.org/essays/
Good luck to you
I read about approaches like this and I still don’t see the reason to do them, beyond “because you can” and “JavaScript is bad”. The separation of data and display logic between server and client is a sensible separation of concerns. It’s the way any non-web solution does it and I don’t really see what would make the web so special that a different approach is worth it.
that's fine that you dont see any reason to use the web as it was designed to be used. But I dont see any reason for me to engage any further with you.
The problem with JS heavy frontend is you now have TWO applications. The real application, on the backend, which makes all the decisions, and the frontend application.
You have TWO states which are being mutated independently that you now have to sync.
you guys are furiously arguing (and not really listening) about this or that hammer being good enough to treat every problem as a nail, like ssr was the "holy hammer". well, it isn't and not every problem is a nail, and while datastar looks excellent to me i simply would have no use for it if i needed client side logic or state for whatever reason.
It has a whole client side signal system.
to be clear, my point was that where the state has to be managed is more often than not an architectural decision given by the requirements, and the choice of tools should be a consequence of that, not a precondition.
The client side logic is, usually, just to make the developers happy because developers love complexity.
Obviously there are many exceptions. But not every application is exceptional. We all hate to admit we're working on simple or trivial things but... We are. Often.
Please, I'm begging you to share this "well documented" fact that most frontend frameworks barely "handle" on the simplest of sites.
https://infrequently.org/2024/11/if-not-react-then-what/ (there's MUCH more at this site as well)
> Nothing that is visible "below the fold" should ever run or load until the page is scrolled down by the site visitor.
The commenter septupled down and eventually blamed trolls :D
Though, for the record, I agree with everything that person - and other sibling commenter - wrote. It is quite obvious the people were not reading and replying in good faith.