Date:
HTMX & Hummingbird
I have recently moved my site over to using HTMX combined with Hummingbird. So far I am really enjoying Hummingbird as it feels like how an async await Swift server should be. Granted this is the first one I have used since I tried Vapor 4 years ago.
Why
For some background, I love using the Swift programming language and have experimented a bit with trying to abstract frontend development with it using the @resultBuilder feature that SwiftUI uses, with projects like Portal that I may make public and talk about more in-depth in the future. In short, I got a SwiftUI inspired DSL working over a web socket similar to how the Pheonix framework works. I used a minimal amount of Javascript to “patch” the DOM. I took a huge shortcut and replaced the entire body on each update. From my limited testing, this worked pretty well. After a few months go by I graduate with my Computer Science degree and decided I need to have something usable to show and work with, and that’s where HTMX comes in.
HTMX
I decided to take on HTMX as a dependency because I wanted some to update and make a responsive frontend in Swift with as minimal amount of Javascript as possible as I really didn’t wanna take on all the dependencies and bloat that comes along with front-end javascript uses. HTMX was pretty easy to add to the project I copied the file into my project. Added to the HTML template I already had and incremental started adding routes and updating the DOM with HTMX. Well, I don’t have the most responsive or interesting UI yet this did allow me to move on to other things well still having a way to easily update the UI as I add more features.
Conclusion
Overall I’m pretty happy with the server setup I have right now. Everything is in Swift from generating the HTML, CSS, and limited Javascript needed to get the front end to work. I have some of this wrapped up in Swift types to make refactoring easier. I can easily add new routes as I need which has allowed me to start working on a campaign Apple App (iOS, iPad, MacOS) as well as a command line tool to interact with this server.