I've been experimenting for some time with writing web frameworks, and I thought it's time to publish one that I really like: it just embeds SQL directly inside HTML without any glue language.
One of the main motivators for getting this minimal was the Hundred Year Web Seervice with htmx presentation by Alexandrer Petros (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lASLZ9TgXyc), that showed that both HTML and SQL have staying power, but he couldn't really find a perfect glue language for his app. After some searching I only found ColdFusion to have implemented the same idea, but instead of the reactive direction that I want to go to, it went towards imperative programming which is not the direction I want to go to. I tried to learn from the original (pre-Adobe) ColdFusion, but make it closer to standard SQL.
I plan to keep the language super simple, just like a template language, make it provide 80% of the CRUD functionality a small web-site needs and add more extension points around it to handle other complexity by other languages.
I have already created a reactive SQL implementation, but the framework got too complex to use, so this is my next experiment (and HTMX can already provide a lot of interactivity).
gedy•9mo ago
xiphias2•9mo ago
What's really exciting is that it gives reactivity, reloading, declarative state and a lot of optimizations almost for free, but as I haven't implemented them in PageQL yet, the advantages are less clear.
bni•9mo ago
HTML + SQL + imperative PL/SQL, running inside the database, right next to the data.
xiphias2•9mo ago
From the replies I think it mainly went out of favour because of lack of reactivity. I could port PageQL to C/Postgresl/Mysql, but I don't think it would be sufficient for a modern application, as reactivity is expected nowdays. Still, I keep it in mind to leave this kind of development as an option in the future.