The appealing simplicity of htmx

June 6, 2024 By Mark Otto Off

Promises from the Ground Up — Josh notes that in order to truly understand promises, a fundamental part of modern JS development, we need “a surprisingly deep understanding of how JavaScript works and what its limitations are”. Luckily, this tutorial covers all the critical context you need.

Josh W Comeau

💡 If you’re a bit more advanced, you might enjoy Alex MacArthur’s look at controlling promises using Promise.withResolvers().

A Powerful JavaScript Reporting Tool Built for the Web — ActiveReportsJS is the premier JavaScript reporting tool designed for advanced data visualizations in web applications. With many different advanced report builders and viewers, insights can be seamlessly shared with your entire user base.

ActiveReportsJS from MESCIUS inc

htmx: Simplicity in an Age of Complicated Solutionshtmx provides access to numerous dynamic features, like Ajax requests and page updates, by way of HTML attributes, and has been increasing in popularity recently. Erik looks at why its simplicity is particularly appealing.

Erik Heemskerk

📺 YouTuber DevelopedByEd has a neat ▶️ 15 minute Go + htmx quickstart screencast targeting JavaScript developers keen to explore new approaches.

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Data Fetching Patterns in Single-Page Applications — With a level of depth you’d expect from a Martin Fowler production, Atlassian’s Juntao Qiu walks through five different patterns to consider when fetching remote data, using a realistic scenario to show them off.

Juntao Qiu and Martin Fowler

Full Stack Web Push API Guide — A complete implementation of push notifications in a Remix app. “If you follow the walk through to the end, you’ll have working push notifications.”

Boaz Sender

🛠 Code & Tools

TypeScriptToLua: Write Lua with TypeScript — Lua is embedded in all sorts of places (games, Redis, NGINX..) so being able to write JavaScript and have it converted could open up some extra opportunities for you.

TypeScriptToLua Contributors

  • Wouter 3.2 – Minimalist router for React & Preact. You can now use regular expressions to define custom route patterns too.

  • PKI.js 3.1 – Pure JS library for working with public key oriented systems. Certificates, signing, etc.

  • Fontsource – 1700+ open source fonts packaged as npm packages.

  • tscircuit – Design circuit boards using a React-based approach.

  • Prisma 5.15 – Popular ORM for Node.js and TypeScript.

  • melonJS 17.3 – Lightweight HTML5 game engine.

🤖 A quick AI-side

First, a handy library:

Second, you may recall that last year (in issue 654) I mentioned a new AI engineering event being put on by two JavaScript developers called The AI Engineer Summit. It turned out to be fantastic and it’s back later this month in a much larger form called The AI Engineer World’s Fair (June 25-27 in San Francisco).

The speaker list is a veritable ‘who’s who’ of the ML-leaning development scene with all the main LLM providers present too, so I’ve decided, at the last minute, I need to be there! If you’re interested in going too, they’ve given us a link with 30% off all the ticket prices for you to use.