So this is an abstraction over FastHTML which is an abstraction over HTMX, Starlette, HTML, and HTTP. HTMX is an abstraction over JS. Starlette is a micro web framework for Python.
So this is the stack you need to know in the real world when debugging an application made with it.
You could say that generative AI is an abstraction over all that. Or in other words I’m saying that’s a lot of edge cases to debug. Sorry to be sceptical.
Imo they are abstractions but not quite as bad as you / myself / everyone else is used to. Monsterui is moreso an extension of fasthtml. It doesn't hide any of the underlying API. Same with fasthtml with respect to htmx.
Htmx also may leverage js but it is meant to patch http functionality based on how http "should" function. See the hypermedia book for that discussion. You don't need to really know that it used js. You don't interact with it via js, just the dom.
As for starlette I'm not currently aware of any server stack that doesn't have some convenience library for that.
My point is that the frameworks which makes us very pessimistic every time a new approach comes out frequently try to make something really easy but once you get far enough you realize that you have to break their abstractions. And create hacks just to access the lower level implementation. I think you'll find something like this very different. When you need control you'll find everything to be much easier to decompose such that you can operate at your needed level of abstraction.
I'm starting to come around to this opinion. I was originally quite bullish on FastHTML but I am starting to feel a little bit lost with all the abstraction and indirection.
I was initially attracted by the idea that I could replace the traditional HTML, CSS, Javascript , Python (backend) project entirely in Python, but it's starting to feel like the original mix of languages might have been the simplest option all along, particularly with GenAI tools
Actually the abstractions are much thinner than with something like NextJS imo. It all comes down to what you are comfortable with. If you learned web dev in the React era, this approach feels very odd, but if you come from something like Ruby on Rails, this actually quite intuitive and not a lot of abstraction (see Jeremy‘s comment in this thread).
I personally like to stay with normal HTML and FrankenUI instead FastHTML instead of MonsterUI tho.
While I sort of agree with your and the parent post (I have always liked Flask with simple Janga templates) I just put a task on my personal schedule to try a project with FastHTML and MonsterUI. A long time ago I found studying JH’s abstractions for deep learning very useful, even though I did all my real work in TensorFlow. It will probably be the same with FastHTML and MonsterUI: I am likely to just use it for one fun project, but I am sure to learn a few things. And, I might use it long term. A no-lose situation because I am retired and my time is my own.
It does feel like just having a base library that renders HTML for you might be quite a good building block for all these libraries. Sorting that layer alone out would be quite useful.
So this is the stack you need to know in the real world when debugging an application made with it.
You could say that generative AI is an abstraction over all that. Or in other words I’m saying that’s a lot of edge cases to debug. Sorry to be sceptical.