Are these animated visualizations in the sky-explainer all original? If so, I am blown away by the visual consistency and meaningfulness of these throughout the article.
And it STILL uses text-based Go templates instead of a proper language based on structured input and output? This was always my main pain point with Helm and also of many others I talked to. This major upgrade was years in the making and they couldn't add support for a single of many available options like CUE, JSONNET, or KCL? What an utter waste.
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?
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.
Awesome! This speaks to something, which I've been thinking (and wishing) for a long time.
I've already done probabilistic programming in a scientific context (Python) and classical software engineering for web development (TypeScript, Python, Rust), and I've always wondered why I couldn't have the real-world modelling capacity of the former with the static type assurances of the latter. Love that you (and Microsoft) are thinking along the same lines!
Do you perhaps know of any Python implementations for this? There are plenty of dynamic stats programming libraries, but none offer typing solutions AFAIK.
This looks awesome! I use a paid VPN mesh service called Tailscale to build k8s clusters which can span across cloud and home setups, but was always frustrated that the Tailscale server component is closed source. Netbird seems to do pretty much the same thing, so maybe I can switch over to it once it's stable enough.
There's an alternative to tailscale service called headscale https://github.com/juanfont/headscale (CLI only server compatible with official tailscale clients)
