hyperwave

hyperwave combines the benefits of traditional server-rendered applications with the flexibility of modern client-side frameworks.

• Performance: Server-side rendering ensures fast, responsive applications, tailored to produce the smallest possible bundles.
• Developer experience: HTMX and Tailwind provide a minimalistic and declarative approach to building user interfaces
• Deployment: bun applications can be easily deployed on any platform as portable binaries

Getting started

Follow these steps to start developing with hyperwave:

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/tireymorris/hyperwave.git
   cd hyperwave

2. Install dependencies:

   bun install

3. Start the development server:

   bun dev

4. Visit http://localhost:1234 in your browser.

5. Start editing server.tsx to see your changes live.

Example

This is the endpoint serving our initial landing page:

app.get("/", ({ html }) =>
  html(
    <Layout title="hyperwave 🌊">
      <section class="flex flex-col gap-8">
        <div>
          <button
            class="bg-blue-100 p-4 text-sm font-bold rounded-md shadow-sm"
            hx-get="/instructions"
            hx-target="closest div"
            _="on click toggle .loading"
          >
            fetch instructions from <code>/instructions</code>
          </button>
        </div>
      </section>
    </Layout>,
  ),
);

• The API serves a full HTML document to the client, which includes Tailwind classes and HTMX attributes
• The response is wrapped in a <Layout /> tag, a server-rendered functional component, which takes a title prop
• The button, when clicked, will issue a GET request to /instructions and replace the content of its parent div with the response.
• Includes a tiny hyperscript to toggle a class when the button is clicked

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Deployment

Build an executable for your current architecture with bun run build

PORT environment variable is available if needed (default is 1234)

Note: deploy public/ with the executable, it contains the generated UnoCSS build.

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Components

• bun provides the bundler, runtime, test runner, and package manager.
• SQLite is production-ready and built into Bun.
• hono is a robust web framework with great DX and performance
• unoCSS is Tailwind-compatible and generates only the styles used in application code.
• htmx gives 99% of the client-side interactivity most apps need.
• hyperscript is a scripting library for rapid application development.
• zod is a powerful runtime validation library.

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Benefits and takeways

Why bother switching to hyperwave?

• Drastically reduces time from idea to rendered UI
• Very little cognitive friction to creating something new, after initial learning curve

Speed / performance benefit

• hyperwave is designed to generate the smallest possible payloads
• Deployment is as simple as compiling and running a binary 😎

Simplicity

• Bun saves us a ton of time and effort fighting tooling issues
• SPAs are over-prescribed and inherently introduce serious costs

Dev UX benefit

• Better primitives for quickly building UX
• Uniform interface simplifies writing and reading code

Architectural benefit

• Can scale backend and product independently, loosely coupled