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?
it's really a full stack back end agnostic framework. i haven't really seen anything like it.
Datastar: Lightweight hypermedia framework for building interactive web apps
221–230 of 298 posts
Re: Datastar: Lightweight hypermedia framework for building interactive web apps
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they are charging for features, those features are a business, even if its a nonprofit business. There is also precedent for the IRS to consider it unrelated business income and to make them pay taxes on it, but that seems to be a huge grey area in US tax law.
LOL. What US tax law?
See for eaxmple the Mozilla IRS dispute as an example. Mozilla resolved this by putting their money making endeavors into a for profit org, which is in turn owned by the nonprofit, but the for profit org pays tax on their income.
https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/unrelated-business...
See also
Re: Datastar: Lightweight hypermedia framework for building interactive web apps
#223Datastar 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.
Re: Datastar: Lightweight hypermedia framework for building interactive web apps
#224Are we back to asp.net webforms?
Manage all state in the server?
Re: Datastar: Lightweight hypermedia framework for building interactive web apps
#225Are we back to asp.net webforms? Manage all state in the server?
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?
Re: Datastar: Lightweight hypermedia framework for building interactive web apps
#226It 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 sig…
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.
So if Mozilla had offered to monetize by asking $299 to use the and 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);
}
Re: Datastar: Lightweight hypermedia framework for building interactive web apps
#227Related 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.ycombinat…
Thanks dang!
Question also: do you somehow keep a "mental catalogue" of related articles or do you use some tool to find these?
Re: Datastar: Lightweight hypermedia framework for building interactive web apps
#228Maybe 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.…
"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 " " for layout).
Yeah and it used to be normal to get up and grab a drink between page transitions.
Re: Datastar: Lightweight hypermedia framework for building interactive web apps
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t feel the rest was really worth engaging with. SSE is a really interesting technology but again, it’s frontend agnostic. You can build a great SSE solution with any other framework. 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 concern…
You do it to reduce complexity. 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.
reducing complexity is important but is hardly the fundamental reason to choose between server side or client side rendering or state management. that just depends on the nature of the problem and the context it has to be solved in. sometimes it doesn't matter, then you have a choice.
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.
Re: Datastar: Lightweight hypermedia framework for building interactive web apps
#230so 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?