A Look at Datastar
A practical exploration of Datastar’s server-driven UI model shows how SSE events can patch client signals or morph HTML without a conventional client-side application framework.
The author walks through the trade-offs: signals are page-global, most are sent with requests by default, and the intentionally limited JavaScript API can complicate integration. The article favors keeping application state and rendering on the server, while noting that some highly interactive pages may need a different balance.
A Lobsters commenter reported a good experience with Django and Datastar; another preferred htmx’s model and wondered how streamed DOM patches recover when client state is uncertain.