Post

Try slowing down the network and interacting with it and see what happens. No feedback that anything is in flight and if i drag a card and then try to edit another before that is done the entire app freezes. I do think Ryan is genuinely open to be proven wrong here but this isn't it.

For sure! Can you clarify which part isn't it? Not trying to be rude, want to be explicit about what we're agreeing or disagreeing on. The feedback on the kanban board example could be improved, agree. How does a SPA handle the slow network roundtrip better here? Not following that part.

Trello as a demo comes from a challenge by Ryan Florence where he roasted peoples implementations seeing specifically how interacting with them broke in various ways when network was slow. There isn't a clear rule set but not waiting for network on every action feels like table stakes.

I trust that your users have read your guides before creating these demos they choose to share with me to show off how good datastar is. Them still failing to build competent apps doesn't inspire confidence that datastar makes building such apps easy.

I'm disappointed with how this conversation has evolved, but that's what I get for trying to have it in twitter-format. It might be more productive to chat in a different format. Feel free to reach out to me directly if you want. I think it could be interesting.

The impetus for this post was in response to Ryan's stream. The argument was that Datastar is not suited to building things in the "application" tier, which I take to mean things with rich interactivity and deep clientside interaction (a la Alex Russell's definitions, for example).

0 reposts1 like

I think I failed to convey clearly up front that: 1. These are LLM-assisted public examples, not production grade applications. 2. I'm interested in discussing the substance of reactive hypermedia (eg datastar) and where tradeoffs are in comparison to eg Solid.

I've consulted, worked on, and led teams now building SPAs in primarily React and derivatives for over a decade. They regularly fail spectacularly, and while I agree that these examples aren't it, I don't think that's sufficient to dismiss the ideas categorically.

I say this in the same way I wouldn't (and don't) dismiss Solid or SPAs or WASM-built apps categorically. What I *am* interested in is the fact that there is a significant complexity cost to SPAs that my teams have struggled with forever. I do not think that complexity is all inherent.