Datastar vs HTMX and SPAs

You love building web apps with Python, and HTMX got you excited about the hypermedia approach -- let the server drive the HTML, skip the JavaScript build step, keep things simple. But then you hit that last 10%: You need Alpine.js for interactivity, your state gets out of sync, and suddenly you're juggling two unrelated libraries that weren't designed to work together.

What if there was a single 11-kilobyte framework that gave you everything HTMX and Alpine do, and more, with real-time updates, multiplayer collaboration out of the box, and performance so fast you're actually bottlenecked by the monitor's refresh rate? That's Datastar.

On this episode, I sit down with its creator Delaney Gillilan, core maintainer Ben Croker, and Datastar convert Chris May to explore how this backend-driven, server-sent-events-first framework is changing the way full-stack developers think about the modern web.

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