132: Caleb Porzio - Just Enough JavaScript with Alpine.js

In this episode of Fullstack Radio, I talk to Caleb Porzia about Alpine JS. This is Fullstack Radio episode 132. The reason I want to have you on the show today is to talk about Alpine JS, which is like a new JavaScript library that I think you've kinda put out into the wild maybe, like, maybe two months ago, probably not even that long ago. Yeah. Something like that. Barely. But it was called project x at the time. That's right. Which still lives on through some of the API secretly and well, not secretly. Pretty in your face in Alpine. Yeah. The the x so Alpine's main API is, like, x hyphen instead of views like v hyphen. And it was just that because I I wanted something generic. Mhmm. And project x when I first thought of project x, I didn't even make the correlation at first. I was just like Oh, really? Project I know. Isn't that ridiculous? Well, x is a good letter for that sort of situation, for sure. It's just a Right. Wild card. And it is the most wild card of letters, I would say. Yep. I've evaluated, like, all the characters that I could possibly use. All 26 characters of the alphabet. I went through hundreds of characters of the alphabet, and that's what I landed on. Love it. So I guess for people who aren't familiar with Alpine, what is your pitch for Alpine? How do you describe it to people? I really like the the tagline. It's it's I think I'm gonna get this right. A rugged a rugged minimal framework for composing behavior, directly in your markup, I think is what it is. But the pitch is basically like, one, it's rugged. It's not like viewer react. There's no virtual dom. So if you flick it, it it's okay. It's not just gonna all blow up. Mhmm. It's minimal, and it's right in your markup. So the idea is that it's a small little library and you compose behavior right in your template. Like, so I I I think right below that I have, like, think of it like tailwind for JavaScript. Mhmm. Because the same idea, like, you accept a little bit of grossness in your markup for not having to maintain a separate file that correlates to your markup. Less context switching. It's just, like, make your HTML kinda like that's the shit where you do stuff. Exactly. So I I think the thing that you kinda leave out in that description that is the important part for me anyways is that Alpine is really like a JavaScript UI sort of manipulation library for very specifically for, like, server rendered apps and server rendered in, like, the 2,005 server rendered way. Not like the I server render my React app server way. Server side rendered. Like, your server sends content type text HTML over the wire, and you want to make that HTML be able to …