Datastar: Lightweight hypermedia framework for building interactive web apps

by freetonik • 10 months ago

306 277 10 months ago

gregoriol2• 10 months ago

Everything about this seems so bad! The website doesn't look serious at all. The code adds crazy html attributes, even more crazy than other crazy front-end frameworks like `data-on-input__debounce.200ms="@get('/examples/active_search/search')"`... this level of wrong is incredible.

macmac3• 10 months ago

Could provide actual arguments for why these aspects of Datastar are "crazy", "even more crazy" and "wrong"?

gregoriol2• 10 months ago

What more do you need than writing something like `data-on-input__debounce.200ms="@get('/examples/active_search/search')"` in the DOM as being crazy and wrong?

brazukadev• 10 months ago

Do you dislike Lisp too?

IshKebab• 10 months ago

Seems pretty elegant if you are willing to give up on the type safety of TSX. I wonder if this can be combined with it somehow. An example using Fresh would be great.

ivape• 10 months ago

I actively look for non-TS frameworks. To me it's always been useless overhead. It really is a outcome of startup/enterprise teams that are so far away from how money goes in and out of a business that they sit around and think TS is a good usage of time. It may hurt their feelings to know plenty of people run successful teams and entire businesses without type safety. It also makes the code look like shit.

To each their own I guess.

brokegrammer• 10 months ago

I mostly agree with this. TS works great in large enterprises where developers don't trust each other. But if you're working on your own, or in a small team where you can easily agree with each other, TS just becomes unnecessary overhead.

At least, that's my experience and I don't like it when people say that everyone must absolutely use TS when they don't know anything about your situation.

hasanhaja15• 10 months ago

The type-safety concern would be to do with your templating tool, right? It doesn't have anything to do with Datastar

macmac3• 10 months ago

With Datastar your front end logic (if any) is minimal, and you can use any typesafe (or not) language you want for the backend. If you build webcomponents for your Datastar frontend you can use TS to your heart's content.

nchmy49• 10 months ago

Datastar itself is written in TypeScript... And it is completely agnostic as to what language or approach you use in your backend, so long as you render html with the appropriate (web standards-compliant) attributes and expressions. Use ts, rust, lisp, or whatever you want on your server.

sudodevnull19• 10 months ago

We have tons of people using TSX in deno or bun. You are just creating it primarily in the back end.

armarr• 10 months ago

This feels like an interation on Hotwire

yxhuvud2• 10 months ago

Yes, with pay to play for trivial features.

sudodevnull19• 10 months ago

Then fork it, it's MIT

dev_ila• 10 months ago

this looks awesome dude

VoidWhisperer2• 10 months ago

Maybe it is because I'm a bit too deep in the React ecosystem at this point, but once you start trying to do any reasonably complex task, this seems like it would be significantly harder to reason about.

Also, unless I'm misunderstanding it, this revolves a lot around the backend returning HTML to do backend-as-frontend, which given my previous experiences with the concept, I wouldn't want to touch with a 10ft pole. When you consider users with extremely bad internet connections (there are still people on dsl/older satellite/2G), having to make more requests to the backend that return larger blobs of html (as opposed to fewer requests that return JSON when it is relevant) will result in a significantly more degraded user experience

withinboredom5• 10 months ago

In my experience from using react apps on 2g/3g… I would much prefer the html. Usually, you get the content in 1-2 seconds with html, where you could end up with a react apps that never loads at all. Why does it never load? Because enterprising engineers usually invent their own timeouts that make no sense when you are dealing with bytes-per-second. There’s already a one minute timeout on the socket, and it knows if it is still receiving where your application has no sense of progress.

Please don’t reinvent things.

VoidWhisperer2• 10 months ago

The issue is that if you have to make more requests overall, there is a non-negligible rtt for each of those requests, which on slow connections can add up very fast

fermigier• 10 months ago

"this revolves a lot around the backend returning HTML"

→ This is the way the Web used to work in the era of 56kbps modems (also, with ten levels of "<TABLE>" for layout).

icedrift• 10 months ago

Yeah and it used to be normal to get up and grab a drink between page transitions.

nchmy49• 10 months ago

If you are truly offline, then of course this won't work.

Though, it is certainly possible to cache pages since most sites do not need persistent state - it's just ephemeral things like toggling a button, linking an input box and another caption, etc...

Though you could run the datastar js sdk from a service worker and if you've synced necessary state to browser storage, you could have your backend there.

Also, for slow connections, compression is very powerful - especially over an sse stream where there's redundant info being sent. Another comment here has links to immense demos and the compression ratios are north of 90%.

Also, slow internet is often also associated with slow devices, which cannot handle the bloat of React, css-in-js etc

Datastar VASTLY simplifies everything while sacrificing essentially nothing in the way of functionality.

knallfrosch• 10 months ago

"Frontend" is a huge field.

Some people write their own websites where they blog (where Wordpress would be enough), some build shops with mostly static content that has to load fast but has no real interactivity, others build full-fledged software like Figma/Discord and for the true masters, the DOM is a prison and only <canvas> coupled with GPU-accelerated computations will do.

Obviously htmx and it's siblings are nice for blogs, docs and shops. You don't build a "software" level website with it.

bradly2• 10 months ago

It isn't mentioned on the homepage, but Datastar does charge for the following features:

    data-animate - Animates element attributes over time.
    data-custom-validity - Adds custom validity to an element.
    data-on-raf - Runs an expression on every animation frame.
    data-on-resize - Runs an expression on element resize.
    data-persist - Persists signals in local storage.
    data-query-string - Syncs query string params with signal values.
    data-replace-url - Replaces the URL in the browser.
    data-scroll-into-view - Scrolls an element into view.
    data-view-transition - Sets view-transition-name styles.

Prices are $299 for a solo dev and $999+ for teams

https://data-star.dev/reference/datastar_pro

mbvisti2• 10 months ago

not sure i think this is a good way to fund their work BUT exploring models to make open-source sustainable for the developers does seem like a good thing, no?

bradly2• 10 months ago

I have no problem with anyone charging what they would like, but I do think it should be mentioned on the homepage. It feels intentionally left off which makes me think the developers themselves aren't 100% comfortable with the model.

imiric5• 10 months ago

I do think this is the most sustainable approach for monetizing open source projects, as long as the developer is fair about it. That is, truly make features that only large and/or enterprise users would have a use for, and only charge for those, instead of arbitrarily deciding to put core features of the software behind a paywall.

In the case of a web framework, that choice is a bit difficult. But if the software is fully functional for the large majority of users, then charging for niche features, or those that are actively discouraged, sounds like a fair approach to me.

foofoo122• 10 months ago

exploring models

This model of using deception to hide costs isn't exactly "exploring". It's tried and tested.

hasanhaja15• 10 months ago

Wanted to include that this is so the development and maintenance of Datastar as a project is sustainable. And that they are a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

https://data-star.dev/star_federation#nonprofit-organization

nchmy49• 10 months ago

What a weird comment. Why bring this up unless you're just trying to make them look bad in a dishonest way? It is clearly documented on the site in multiple places.

Moreover, they actively dissuade people from even buying the pro license because they are quite emphatic that most people/sites do not need any of these features. If you do need them, then it's a small price to pay for the functionality, as well as to make a modest amount to cover costs for their non-profit org. God forbid someone optionally charge something for years of effort that they have given away for free...

It also comes with an immensely useful "Inspector" that shows all the signals, sse events etc, and will soon come with an immensely streamlined web component framework (Rocket) and css framework (Stellar).

I bought the pro license mostly just to support them, but the inspector is great and I look forward to checking out rocket and stellar.

xdfgh11126• 10 months ago

I appreciated it. If I'm going to consider a framework I want to know if some of it costs money. Especially like 299usd.

Frankly your response seems very hostile and makes me wants to avoid them more.

sarchertech6• 10 months ago

This is an example of the entitled subset of people who come out of the woodwork whenever an open source project has any kind of monetization or even just a non-standard license prohibiting billion dollar companies from selling their project as a service.

I guarantee the fact that I referred to a project with an anti Amazon clause as open source will piss some of the off so much that they’ll comment here about it.

skyfantom• 10 months ago

Didn't find anything about this on the main page.

Unai• 10 months ago

I opened my HN client and saw multiple posts at the top of the home page about this datastar thing, with comments like yours either very aggressively defending it or praising it as the best thing since bread.

Did you forget one of those "full disclosure" thingies at the top of your comment?

In any case, I didn't see anything interesting about it, even less so after reading OP's useful comment on the pricing, but even if I did I would never intentionally use or give money to a company that does astroturfing campaigns.

mexicocitinluez5• 10 months ago

It is clearly documented on the site in multiple places.

Hold up, so then why is pasting THEIR documentation into a comment weird?

lol. This is an absolutely insane response to someone simply informing the commentors that there is a price involved in the pro package.

yxhuvud2• 10 months ago

Yeah, I have no idea why someone would want to consider this over turbo + stimulus

andersmurphy21• 9 months ago

Because turbo stimulus doesn't let you build a multiplayer spreadsheet performantly and realtime in a few hundred lines of code.

Baguette5242• 10 months ago

I tried Datastar and it was great, then I saw this kind of move and it turned me down immediately.

I don't believe it is the right way to play. A Pro support would have been better. Plus the fact that the licensing prevent to use the Datastar Pro in any kind of open-source project. Very strange move.

sudodevnull19• 10 months ago

Then don't buy it, you probably need it

Terretta• 10 months ago

So if Mozilla had offered to monetize by asking $299 to use the <blink> and <marquee> tags that would turn you off the rest of the browser? Or do you think you could make text blink another way?

Here's how you replace the URL without a page refresh:

  function processAjaxData(response, urlPath){
      document.getElementById("content").innerHTML = response.html;
      document.title = response.pageTitle;
       window.history.pushState({"html":response.html,"pageTitle":response.pageTitle},"", urlPath);
  }

Similar snippets for the other few and you have successfully avoided helping fund the framework!

davidwparker• 10 months ago

You should probably update your comment to at least let people know this is a one-time lifetime cost. Not a subscription.

Which is priced similar to Tailwind UI, which people are fine paying for.

andersmurphy21• 9 months ago

Those prices are for one off lifetime purchase too! That's crazy. I don't know why they bother. They'll never make back the money for the time they put in developing it.

Such a bad move. I told them they should charge more and actually have useful features in pro.

teekert2• 10 months ago

That movie at the bottom makes me want to use it for any next project. Gold. "The planet uncomplicanus" :D

Blahagun• 10 months ago

Oh great, yet another front-end framework, but this one is with paid features as well. Are we seriously going to pretend this isn't getting out of hand?

hasanhaja15• 10 months ago

What's your concern with the paid features?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45537335

nchmy49• 10 months ago

they're a 501c3 non profit and they actively dissuade people from buying the pro license, because YAGNI. If you want those features, or just want to support a genuinely innovative framework that people spent years building, you can get the license. Its not that expensive and is a one-time purchase.

sudodevnull19• 10 months ago

it's really a full stack back end agnostic framework. i haven't really seen anything like it.

andersmurphy21• 10 months ago

For those of you who don't think Datastar is good enough for realtime/collaborative/multiplayer and/or think you need any of the PRO features.

These three demos each run on a 5$ VPS and don't use any of the PRO features. They have all survived the front page of HN. Datastar is a fantastic piece of engineering.

- https://checkboxes.andersmurphy.com/

- https://cells.andersmurphy.com/

- https://example.andersmurphy.com/ (game of life multiplayer)

On both the checkboxes/cells examples there's adaptive view rendering so you can zoom out a fair bit. There's also back pressure on the virtual scroll.

afavour6• 10 months ago

They have all survived the front page of HN

Right but this says “bring your own backend” in big letters on the splash page. So surviving HN isn’t really something Datastar is doing here.

nchmy49• 10 months ago

I don't understand what point you're trying to make.

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.

andersmurphy21• 10 months ago

Sure. You're not wrong. I'd argue Datastar's fat morph model is what lets me write a much simpler backend that's amenable to batching/better compression. It's also fast enough on the client that this immediate mode style rendering of HTML is actually possible.

I'm also not doing anything fancy on the backend, I'm using a dynamic language not known for it's speed (Clojure). Really, most of the work here is being done by SQLITE, batching, and brotli compression, which you can all use from any language.

I will concede that languages with access to real threads (GO, JAVA, C# etc) do better out of the box for this kind of CQRS architecture.

miroljub2• 10 months ago

[flagged]

andersmurphy21• 10 months ago

It's global multiplayer, you can see everyone changes simultaneously. There's no client side state for the checkboxes they are all on the server.

jakewins• 10 months ago

The whole point of this framework is that a ton of the logic remains on the backend, with live connections to the frontend. At least for me the performance and hosting cost implications of that was the first question that came to my mind when I looked at this, I don’t understand how answering this question isn’t relevant here.

dang4• 10 months ago

Can you please not post like this here? It's against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

emschwartz• 10 months ago

Does anyone have a detailed comparison of the functionality you get from Datastar versus HTMX + Alpine.js? My impression was that Datastar was trying to be a lighter weight combination of the other two.

nchmy49• 10 months ago

I don't know about a detailed comparison, but datastar basically does everything those do combined, but in a smaller, simpler package.

It also sticks to web standards as closely as possible (whereas htmx is trying to propose it's api as web standards).

It also has SSE, idiomorph, and more baked in by default whereas those are optional extensions in htmx.

They're also releasing css and web component frameworks/tools soon that look VERY powerful and simple.

Datastar has the potential to completely change web development.

teekert2• 10 months ago

It sounds like some form of Event Sourcing? I didn't get much technical details from the page, and the (otherwise excellent) movie.

nchmy49• 10 months ago

It can be, but doesn't need to be. It's highly compatible with cqrs and event driven in general, usually done with sowmthing like a pubsub event bus (NATS is most often used). Whether you want to go all the way to event sourcing is up to you - it's completely agnostic as to how you do your backend.

Mizza• 10 months ago

Reinventing the wheel and then charging for simple features?

If this paradigm excites you, just use Phoenix, dawg. It's so far ahead, everything else feels primitive.

Alifatisk• 10 months ago

I can't use Phoenix with Rails now, can I?

nchmy49• 10 months ago

What here has been reinvented? There's nothing out there like datastar. Htmx + alpine is similar, but much heavier and less functional.

And God forbid someone try to make open source sustainable by charging for largely-unnecessary functionality and actively dissuading you from buying it - as the devs do regularly in their discord.

And phoenix doesn't work with ANY backend language or framework.

hasanhaja15• 10 months ago

Simple features? Making those imperative APIs declarative is not very simple for me, but you're welcome to not use those features and write them yourself.

A couple of things on the Phoenix point:

- Requires the adoption of Elixir and Datastar is backend agnostic - Adopting Phoenix feels more suited to greenfield projects, but Datastar is suited for that and brownfield ones. - Websockets vs Server Sent Events has been really interesting and nuanced

TeddyDD• 10 months ago

In what specific areas Phoenix Live View is so far ahead? Do you mind elaborating?

The unfortunate disadvantage of Live View is that you need to write Elixir. A lovely language, but it would be hard to sell in company that use only <SOME_LANGUAGE>. The hypermedia libraries like d* and htmx can be used with any backend.

mawadev• 10 months ago

This post and other posts about datastar on the hn frontpage seem unnatural to me. It's like a marketing effort to astroturf this, especially with newly created accounts interacting with this...

cjs_ac• 10 months ago

I'm using HTMX and had never heard of Datastar until today. I imagine there's a fair few people who saw the first post, looked into it and found other things about Datastar, and decided to post them.

nchmy49• 10 months ago

This and other negative, yet argument-free, comments about datastar are what seem unnatural to me...

penultimatename• 10 months ago

I thought the same before I saw your comment. Several posters are new or have also posted on previous posts about Datastar (and are oddly aggressive.)

evilduck• 10 months ago

Yeah, why does hypermedia attract folks who always sound so aggressive? It's a weird but common theme.

sarchertech6• 10 months ago

That’s a common HN pattern. Someone posts something about “why I switched to x” and it inspires someone else to link to the the x website, or even to other similar projects websites, and they all make it to the front page. It’s just a common synergistic phenomenon.

dang4• 10 months ago

I think it was probably the copycat/followup effect rather than anything coordinated, but I haven't looked closely.

Trying to decide whether to merge the threads and/or which of them should 'win'...

andersmurphy21• 9 months ago

If the datastar team was capable of such a coordinated marketing effort I doubt they'd be in the business of running a non profit, or building a niche HTML streaming framework. Or having a one off purchase model for pro.

I mean unless you consider me linking my dumb demos everytime someone accuses hypermedia of not being suitable for realtime/collaborative apps. That I'm 100% guilty of.

ksec• 9 months ago

One submitted by me, and this one by others, both accounts are ~2012. Not exactly new account.

philipallstar2• 10 months ago

I think something I'd love is to see how to adopt some of the more decent frontend practices (e.g. having a component library) but rendering them using a backend that isn't something like NextJS. Can you import a component library and use it in a Flask app, say, or are the worlds just fundamentally too different?

nchmy49• 10 months ago

You can use datastar with ANY backend and templating system that you want - you just have to return html with the appropriate (and standards-compliant) attributes and, optionally, js expressions.

Use php, python, rust, or anything else that you want. They all have various approaches to html templating.

markusw4• 10 months ago

For Go, something like gomponents [0] or Templ [1] would fit that. (Disclaimer: I wrote gomponents.) I even have a Datastar integration now. [2]

[0] https://www.gomponents.com

[1] https://templ.guide

[2] https://www.maragu.dev/gomponents-datastar

philipallstar2• 10 months ago

Thanks - interesting! I was more thinking of a workflow where a designer makes a component in Figma, and it's probably polished and made available in a component library by a frontend/UI person, and it's probably a React component or a Web component. I was wondering whether that workflow was at all compatible with any of the non-JS backends that are reclaiming frontend a little.

sudodevnull19• 10 months ago

And gomponents is great!

imiric5• 10 months ago

Datastar is one of the few projects in the web ecosystem in years that feels like a paradigm shift for the better.

The author (Delaney Gillilan) has put a lot of thought into how modern web development should be done from first principles, while leveraging core web technologies like SSE, and eschewing complexity as much as possible. His proposed GoNaDs stack[1] enables some truly impressive web applications. I highly recommend watching this talk[2] to get a sense of what's possible.

I wish the best of luck to the core team and contributors, and hope that this framework, or something like it, disrupts the modern ecosystem of popular web frameworks and stacks.

[1] https://gonads.net/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K71AyAF6E4

nchmy49• 10 months ago

I was just commenting to someone yesterday how it's a testament to how refined this is that he's been working hard for over 2 years to produce such a small amount of code. I can only imagine how many variations he's gone through in order to get to what we see today - a refined, simple, easy, powerful way to do SSR-driven declarative interactivity, etc

And if that isn't enough, he's also on the cusp on releasing a web component framework that puts Lit to shame, AND a css framework that looks equally impressive.

He takes some getting used to, but the guy is a genius and is enormously generous with his time and deep knowledge.

I really do hope that d* gains more traction - the web could be such a better place, just at a time when native apps are literally under assault and censure by app stores and autocratic governments.

imiric5• 10 months ago

it's a testament to how refined this is that he's been working hard for over 2 years to produce such a small amount of code.

In the words of some famous people:

Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

I think Delaney definitely follows these principles, which is refreshing to see in modern web development. The author of htmx, Carson Gross, also deserves a mention.

And if that isn't enough, he's also on the cusp on releasing a web component framework that puts Lit to shame, AND a css framework that looks equally impressive.

Ah, I wasn't aware of that. I'll keep an eye out for those. I see they're also opposed to Tailwind, which is an absolute abomination IMO. I don't have experience with Lit, but it seemed like a nice abstraction over core Web Components, which feel like a half-baked solution.

Ideally, I want these things to be part of core web technologies, and for web developers to not need to rely on 3rd-party frameworks. Web browsers should be better. Web servers should be better. The entire web development and user experience should be simpler, more secure, robust, etc. But given that large corporations dictate what that experience is like, I'm glad that we have fresh thinking from people who are not already engrained in this system. While the ecosystem catches up, I would use anything they produce, or build my own[1], over using established and popular technologies any day of the week.

[1] https://github.com/hackfixme/miu

basro• 10 months ago

Hey, I'm curious about the web component framework and css framework you mentioned. I was unable to find info about it, could you link me?

lucyjojo• 9 months ago

299usd is simply unaffordable for a lot of people though.

markusw4• 10 months ago

Thank you for sharing the youtube links in particular! It's nice to get some background info and intent for interesting libraries.

Imustaskforhelp4• 10 months ago

Not sure why the community is being so hostile like use phoenix or it charges or its hostile

Like no its not.

This is a genuinely cool project and most parts of it is open source and it can run on any language and its interesting that they are looking at a way so that they can fund the development of it in the process as well

Its their project and they are the only ones entitled to really push things the way they want.

It looks cool and I might hack with it in golang. Thanks a lot for your work.

One minor feedback I want to share is that although I don't mind having a charge for things, 299$ especially in my country is a seriously lot of money and I think that some of these might be needed by me if I go full in on it but I genuinely can't afford even the single tier one.

Could the non profit atleast have some dynamic pricing for all countries sort of like steam? And/or donating to people.... like I mean genuinely no shade whatsoever at the datastar team but animation etc. are already available in sveltekit for free and I don't want it for free but I just genuinely can't afford it here...

Another suggestion could be to lean very heavily on the entreprise who can afford such things much rather easily or maybe even more and maybe you/team can lower the price for solo so that solo devs can try things out and not be worried for 299$-ish y'know?

Deep respects for the project, Its another tool which is mostly free so the community's reaction is very weird for that...

But if I can be genuinely honest, I am saying this as a guy who has never paid any community/anything online but I would for the first time genuinely sponsor the project for 5-10$ (I know it ain't much but that's all I am comfortable with donating as a teenager right now)

Can you please charge atleast the solo level to atleast be the price of the silksong? I don't know but I will try the project out as it looks super cool

sarchertech6• 10 months ago

The problem is that a small company still needs to provide support from their own very high cost of living country.

$5 doesn’t cover the cost of you filing a single support ticket.

Imustaskforhelp4• 10 months ago

I understand it sincerely.

Is there some middle way that I could use these datastar attributes/paid offerings via lets say 5$ but I wouldn't get support from the team itself.

I think that they might have a discord server as well and so I am more than okay to take support from the community itself if I can be honest...

Simply because like me and others, we simply can't pay 299$ when we don't require support.

Could another tier be created that allows people to use it but just without any official support in the sense that maybe you could create github issues or something about it but don't expect mission critical of sorts...

I hope you can see things from my perspective as well & I know some companies / projects which also do something similar where they offer support seperately / at a higher price but using the product itself doesn't cost you / costs you very little and you can always use unofficial-ish help.

What are your thoughts? Do you think that datastar could integrate something like this?

nchmy49• 10 months ago

This is the only valid and reasonable criticism I've seen here so far, kudos to you.

299 is, indeed, inaccessible for many people. But, the devs live in places where things cost more, so its also a tiny price compared to the relative value that they provide.

I do think that some sort of geo-relative pricing structure would be worth looking into, but how does one even implement something like that? Is there something that makes it all "just work"? I suspect not. Moreover, the devs have already given away so much of their time - it doesnt make much sense for them to invest even more of it into designing a pricing system like this, from which they are going to possibly earn only a negligible amount from. Perhaps this is a problem that you might like to address yourself?

Anyway, the devs are very clear that most people should never need the Pro license. 95+% of the functionality and value is available for free in the open-source library. Use it, enjoy it, learn from it, profit from it!

markusw4• 10 months ago

What I've done in a project once is use Purchasing Power Parity: basically, there's an index for purchasing power, and you adjust your pricing based on that. It's implemented in some major payment platforms, like Gumroad: https://gumroad.com/help/article/327-purchasing-power-parity

throwup238• 10 months ago

Is there something that makes it all "just work"?

Stripe?

You can geolocate via IP as a first pass for the frontend, check the card’s country code for the order, and then the billing/shipping/account address if it’s really that important (like when your service has different costs depending on locality).

I’m sure there are services that can handle it for you but it’s so simple to implement price discrimination to whatever threshold you want that I’ve never checked. The hard part was always figuring out the false positive/negative rate and the frontend flow when the different steps disagree on location, but those are edge cases that don’t really matter with zero marginal cost digital goods.

contrast2• 9 months ago

I pay for a lot of software eg I used Screen Studio a couple of times, liked it, dropped a couple hundred bucks for it. Good work from a solo dev.

Datastar have basic functionality in the pro license. Basic UX capabilities like animation and copy to clipboard.

The devs aren’t “very clear” that most people should never need the license. That’s just PR. They’ve picked a bunch of features that even a teenage hobbyist might want to use as part of a trivial application. There’s no relationship between the locked features and their value or complexity.

I would avoid any web framework that might get in my face like this, at some random moment working on a pet project to try out a new thing, with an invoice demanding payment if I want to use random features.

“Perhaps this is a problem that you might like to address yourself?”

No I’m good, thanks. The Datastar community needs some work, going by the attitude of their defenders in this thread. Someone else is saying the way they charge money isn’t a monetization strategy. It’s nonsense.

Nothing wrong with charging money. Just be honest about it, take it in the chin when people don’t want to buy, and ideally have a pricing strategy that makes sense.

HiPhish2• 10 months ago

Not sure why the community is being so hostile

I cannot speak for other people, but here is where I'm coming from:

- There is no mention of Pro on the home page, I only found out about Pro after flipping through the documentation. This comes off as sleazy, like "Look at our cool open-source project", and then after they have you hooked they go "oh, if you want all all of it you gotta get Pro". - Pro is locking genuine features, not just support, video tutorials or code examples. - It is vendor lock-in, if you want to rely on any Pro feature you are now at the mercy of the maintainers. - What make the vendor lock-in particularly problematic is the fact that without Datastar your website will not work. Sure, it does suck if your CI service, test platform or whatever does not work, but as long as you can compile and deploy the code you will survive, even if you have to do it by hand. Not so with a library. - There are no examples of what your are buying. At least with the non-Pro features you can try them out for free without any commitment, but when it comes to Pro you are just taking a blind guess as to whether any of them are what you want. Compare that to the Pro examples Alpine has[1], where you can play around with them in the browser. - I don't know if you get source code, but even if you do you cannot share your improvements with anyone.

Note that I never mentioned the price. The value will vary from person to person, for some it will be unaffordable, for others it will be a great deal (e.g. freelancers who will make the money back within one gig). I got my employer to sponsor Alpine a year ago and they have given more to Alpine than what Datastar are charging for Pro.

For reference, two projects which have non-objectionable Pro versions are Alpine.js[2] and React Flow[3]. React flow even have a link to their Pro page right on the home page.

[1] https://alpinejs.dev/components [2] https://alpinejs.dev/components [3] https://reactflow.dev/pro

nchmy49• 10 months ago

congrats, you have described external dependencies

esjeon• 10 months ago

This pattern isn't new per-se. The industry already went through it when moving from DHTML to XHR, and it was (mostly) abandoned for good reasons. Modern DOM patching techniques gave rise to some newer variations, but they still make the same old trade-offs. They don't really solve engineering issues like tight coupling and brittleness, nor network issues like latency and larger payload volume.

So, to me, this feels more like an effort to offer a more affordable solution (in terms of engineering cost) for small-/mid-sized companies, rather than a push to expand the boundaries of the technology. Not a bad thing, but it's just a bit disappointing to see history kinda looping back on itself.

NaomiLehman2• 10 months ago

Doesn't Astro solve this already?

sudodevnull19• 10 months ago

Not in the slightest

sudodevnull19• 10 months ago

Datastar author here. Yes nothing is new here, that's kind of the point. You seemingly lost her way with jQuery which was just sprinkle on the page but then spa wasn't interesting approach at reactivity while missing all the points of the back end controlling most the state. I'm not trying to be innovative I'm just trying to get us back to some normalcy

masfoobar• 10 months ago

Seems interesting.

I don't think its going to make me swap from htmx, though. We shall see.

oulipo2• 10 months ago

Interesting, but do I understand correctly that:

- this would mostly work if the sole consumer of your API is the frontend, since it returns HTML, rather than, eg JSON that would be consumed by a CLI, some streaming tools, clients, etc

- this would not really be suited to some Capacitor app?

andersmurphy21• 9 months ago

Yeah it assumes your building a full stack app driven by the backend. So the client and backend are tightly coupled and built for each other.

chuckadams2• 10 months ago

Datastar's ideas look wonderful, and I've thought of adopting it myself, but hobbling the open source version to not compete with pro this early on sounds like a fast ticket to a hard fork. It's not like they command a vast ecosystem that would be reluctant to switch.

[edit: Seems like the model with an open core and some closed plugins could work out fine. If not, everyone's got options. Wishing success for both the D* developers and the users.]

nchmy49• 10 months ago

sounds like a fast ticket to a hard fork.

Indeed! Could you do us all a favour and fork the pre-pro plugins and make them compatible with the current iteration of d* pro? They're all like 50 LOC, after all, so should be simple.

chuckadams2• 10 months ago

Were I so inclined, I'd make them compatible with non-pro. And more likely just take my fork in whatever direction I cared to, just keeping the wire format compatible (and likely negotiable). But it's a project best left for people actually using Datastar, not curious onlookers like me.

sudodevnull19• 10 months ago

Please do! I highly recommend doing that, PLEASE FORK

jopicornell2• 9 months ago

I have already seen a few of your responses to criticism coming up toxic like this. They don't need to fork it, but some of your potential customers could. They are explaining to you their opinions, and in HN, this is very valuable.

Most of us have some decision at companies, which are your real customers, and criticism like I've seen you respond boldly and badly, is the criticism I think you should review and take into account.

Personally, I like everything of the pro, except the features that you decided to exclude. Doesn't seem pro features, but features you ramdomly decided not to open source them, and that could be ok. But instead of doing it like this, maybe put a restrictive license so that companies with more than 5 people have to pay.

But I think you should focus on premium/pro features that are really a plus, like your debugger, the bundler, etc. And find features that aren't common and give a plus.

And it is an opinion which you may disagree with, but if you respond to me, don't do it like that, because to me, it is not professional and I'll tend to avoid doing business with people that respond like that

kitd• 10 months ago

"Hobbling" is too strong a word. There's a handful of attributes and events that are only available in Pro and none look fundamental to the operation of most sites [1]. In fact they could all probably be replaced with a bit of custom JS sent up from the server.

[1] https://data-star.dev/reference/datastar_pro

azemetre2• 10 months ago

Is there documentation on how they made that slick Star space animation on the front page? Very cool and retro looking

sudodevnull19• 10 months ago

It's just a basic 1kb web component driven by datastar attributes

azemetre2• 10 months ago

Do you have a link to the web component? I can't find the site code anywhere on their github org.

dang4• 10 months ago

Related ongoing thread: I switched from Htmx to Datastar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45536000 - Oct 2025 (223 comments)

There is also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45537372, which I'm trying to figure out what to do with (bear with me... edit: ok, I found a place to merge it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45536535)

Previously:

Datastar: Web Framework for the Future? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43655914 - April 2025 (155 comments)

joshdavham• 10 months ago

Thanks dang!

Question also: do you somehow keep a "mental catalogue" of related articles or do you use some tool to find these?

dang4• 9 months ago

Mostly I just use HN Search but in a sped-up way that relies on a browser extension.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44861185 (and the other stuff linked from there) has more details

sigmonsays• 10 months ago

as a newb, does datastar work on mobile?

Most web pages I try to build never look right on firefox on android.

pst• 10 months ago

I've been building a frontend with Go, Templ and Datastar for a few months now. I really like the @actions and how the page is updated with the response.

I'm on the fence about signals though. They are fine for simple things like individual text form fields or opening closing a drop-down. But my backend is a Kubernetes style API server. And storing a JSON Kubernetes style resource in a signal does not work because of how Datastar implements parsing the structure into child signals. For me it would be better to just be able to turn this off.

One example where it breaks are K8s labels. They are map[string]string and the key is often hostname prefixed. E.g. example.com/label-key. Datastar can't handle these keys at all and the resulting signals are a mess.

I'm aware that I may be using signals not as intended. But something as simple as data-signals-resource="k8sJson" and then data-bind="resource.metatdata.name" is a great way to work. And it works for metadata name. But it doesn't work if any part of the path needs to be an index in a list or a label key in hostname style.

The other thing I find painful about Datastar signals are the magic about how attributes written something-something in HTML become somethingSomething in JS and all all the snake, camel etc. __modifiers. It's just error prone to work with. Not a great experience.

But overall I still stuck with it so far and am happy with the general idea of HTMX and Alpine functionalities implemented as one and using hypermedia as a general approach. Anything so I can avoid the NodeJS ecosystem really.

When a few RCs back the wire format changed, it was quite a laborious update for me, because using Fiber I can't use the Go SDK and implemented my own. But the wire format clearly changed for the better so it was worth it.

I think the developers are on to something and should keep iterating.

GiffertonThe3rd• 10 months ago

Having followed Data-* from its beginning, it's now fascinating seeing how these threads play out. The troll-y takes from those who took one brief look at the front-page and felt compelled to tear it down in their own 'worthy, hot-take'.

Like T3, the critiques usually compare to JS stacks or how non-HTML it looks(!). It just doesn't make sense to them, so... "I know what I must do, instead of looking into this more, make sure I have a fuller picture of this thing, HN NEEDS to know now".

You have every right, of course. But you undermine yourselves as soon as you post - you clearly have not taken any time to understand where it came from, why it is what it is. Your responses are not, say, genuine questions for clarification or helpful critiques. For the most part they are straight out judgements: 'This is just wrong'.

Of course in your minds the front-page MUST provide you all that in under 30secs, yes? Like, the 'hidden', 'real cost' is ON ANOTHER PAGE?! - instead of reading the reasoning behind it and why YOU won't need it.

You don't need to immediately post here - you are not really looking for answers, are you? You could've just read the website and history of Data- for that?

To all the 'clarfiers' here like Delaney, Anders, nchmy, and others, thank you for the comments refuting most of this stuff, it must be tiring.

All the best, An old, grumpy, ex-HyperCard 'programmer'. *You don't need to validate your comment by reply to this, many comments here are valid and you know it.

didip• 10 months ago

Anything that’s using server side rendering gets my vote.

But isn’t HTMX+Websocket basically the same as datastar?

replwoacause4• 9 months ago

Mine too. I’ve been playing with this lately

https://www.zjax.dev/

And I like what the author is doing

nchmy49• 9 months ago

Not at all, for many reasons.

HTMX doesn't do any client side interactivity. You need something like alpinejs for that. And alpine doesn't have signals, which are super useful (when used judiciously)

Datastar uses sse rather than websockets, which is simpler and more compatible http,web standards etc. Htmx can use either sse or ws, but both are a separate plugin.

Consequently, datastar does much more than htmx+alpine+ws/sse, in a fraction of the js size.

Htmx (and alpine, I think) introduces it's own html attributes whereas datastar uses spec-compliant data-* attributes (hence the name)

Htmx's api is much more complicated due to all of the extra attributes. Datastar is more concise.

Datastar has backend SDKs for all popular languages, to make it easy to send html fragment and signals updates via sse.

There's lots more as well. Very worth checking out.

melasadra• 10 months ago

Is there a good Datastar tutorial creating a small project that shows off Datastar's strengths and how the DX feels like?

I saw the game of life and checkbox examples but I've never used Clojure

nchmy49• 10 months ago

datastar is backend agnostic - you generate the html however you want.

you can check out this repo if you want to see a simple golang implementation. https://github.com/zangster300/northstar

And all of the sdks have some simple examples. https://github.com/starfederation

andersmurphy21• 9 months ago

Yeah. That's the real rug pull all my code is in Clojure. Which is rough if you're not familiar with reading lisp.

There's a few examples in typescript and go floating around.

Here's one:

https://github.com/Mortalife/datastar-chat-example-ts

JSR_FDED• 10 months ago

Datastar is run by some principled (and opinionated) guys who are immensely generous with their time and supportive to newcomers.

What’s getting lost in the whole kerfufflw over the Pro version is that this is NOT a monetization strategy. There is no intent to hook you - in fact they go out of their way to tell your you don’t need it. And the company is a registered non-profit.

Based on their own extensive experience they know which tiny set of features are likely to appeal to a very small group of people and at the same time are likely to incur the vast majority of support burden. By keeping these features out of the core they keep the base product simple and universal.

It is in fact an innovative and fair way of (a) signaling that these features are likely footguns, (b) getting just some of their costs covered by the people who either need the most support or are getting so much value from Datastar that they’re paying, (c) thereby freeing up their time to spend on the larger community.

esperent• 9 months ago

    data-animate - Animates element attributes over time.

    data-on-resize - Runs an expression on element resize.
    
    data-scroll-into-view - Scrolls an element into view.

If these are footguns then they can't be designed very well. I also don't think you can say that they'd only appeal to a small group.

I don't have any problem with them charging for whatever they want to. But let's not make up excuses.

andersmurphy21• 9 months ago

1. You should be using CSS for animations

2. You should be using data-on to listen to the window level resize event (which doesn't require a pro plugin).

3. Scroll element into view can be replicated with data-on-load="el.scrollIntoView()"

The main benefit of pro is supporting the project.

contrast2• 9 months ago

Copy-to-clipboard is a support heavy feature?

Do you really think Datastar is of such ridiculously bad quality that even simple features require a lot of support to get working?

hasanhaja15• 9 months ago

Use the Navigator API directly then? Why do _need_ a declarative version of it?

barapa• 9 months ago

I implemented copy to clipboard in datastar in maybe 1 minutes with an AI agent. What exactly are you providing to the world for free?

pragmatic2• 10 months ago

Are we back to asp.net webforms?

Manage all state in the server?

pragmatic2• 10 months ago

Yes we've come full circle.

Sending chunks of html from the backend and updating only parts of the page is what webforms did 20ish years ago.

I'm trying to figure out what the appeal is here?

d--b• 9 months ago

so all the UIs I work on have some form of pivotable grids handling some decent quantity of data (several 100k rows)

Obviously in react I can find components that work fine.

But is that something datastar can deal with well, or is this something where Î’d need datastar and some frontend js?

replwoacause4• 9 months ago

I like what https://www.zjax.dev/ has done

est• 9 months ago

seems a little crazy, why can't we use traditional methods like this?

just an idea

webcoon• 9 months ago

Docs mention absolutely nothing about offline use, service workers, or PWAs. How am I supposed to build a modern web app with that? Rely on always having internet?

hu3• 9 months ago

Rely on always having internet?

Yes? Very few cases need offline capabilities. Why complicate things unnecessarily?

nchmy49• 9 months ago

I'm extremely interested in this sort of use case and am regularly disappointed to find that very few others are. And even fewer are interested in doing it in a hypermedia-first way.

There's two ways this could be approached.

1. Just cache the backend-generated html that has datastar attributes in it, and serve it from a service worker. Datastar library in the main thread won't know or care whether it came from service worker, edge worker or your backend.

2. If there's a need for dynamic data/templating (eg user-specific into), you can do so in the service worker - if you've stored the templates and data already. But that has little to do with datastar - you'd have to do that in any case.

However, service workers have limitations with regards to things like dynamic script imports, using es modules etc. You can send messages to a dedicated web worker which handles rendering and returns the html, but it does get complicated. Sharedworker would be even better but android chromium still doesn't support it - but they're finally trialing it and hopefully it'll be available in 6 months.

The only datastar-specific consideration is if you want to do something like stream sse events from the "backend" to the datastar library in the main thread/dom. The TypeScript/JavaScript sdk works just fine in the service worker as well, and can maintain a long-lived connection to periodically stream new messages. Of course, service worker lifecycle is somewhat of a black box and out of your control, but that has nothing to do with d*.

So, overall, yes you can use datastar offline. But it comes with all the issues that you'd face with another approach.

rrgok• 9 months ago

It amazes that we are a still solving low level problems for CRUD applications. No, you cannot develop highly interactive non CRUD app with Datastar/HTMX/Unpoly.

We need higher level abstractions and solutions. How the client and the server communicate is still low level for developing apps, more so CRUD apps.

0xcb0• 9 months ago

The more I look at it, the more it feels like knowing Vue will vastly help when learning to transmit ones workflow.

Will use it on of my next projects and try it out. Looks interesting. Thanks for the good work!

Datastar: Lightweight hypermedia framework for building interactive web apps

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