[Jeremy Howen]
Hi, I’m Jeremy Howen. Hi, I’m Jonath. Hi, I’m Nate. We wanted to give you a quick introduction here to FastHTML. Have a look at some of these things that we made.
[Jonath]
So this first example is a chatbot that I made to interact with ChatGPT. You may need to try out a styling library for these beautiful looking chat bubbles. And this is the entire source code, there’s no other components to it.
[Nate]
And this is an app that I made based off of Conway’s Game of Life that allows multiple users to be able to play the game of life. And the backend, it uses WebSockets. And as you can see, the code is quite small.
[Jeremy Howen]
Here’s my little demo. It’s maybe the most uninteresting one in some ways, but I like it because it’s an example of like everything. It’s markdown, it’s drag and drop, it’s a complete custom login system. And that entire thing also fits onto a single screen of code written from scratch.
Other people are making cool stuff with this as well.
[00:01:02]
If you know a bit of web programming already, you’ll get started real fast. Legendary author and web programmer Daniel Roy-Greenfield said he would like to give it a try. And within 45 minutes of starting out with FastHTML, he sent me a screenshot and said, look, I’ve just created a complete blog system. There’s lots of great ways to create web applications nowadays.
Data scientists in particular love these rapid dashboarding apps like Radio and Streamlet. What we’ve heard though, and we found ourselves, is that when you’re ready to go to the next level beyond your dashboard or proof of concept, things like this require rewriting from scratch in a totally different framework and learning a whole lot of new skills.
Lots of people have created lots of fantastic web applications in Django. For example, Instagram is written in Django. But it’s pretty complicated. This is the getting started setting up a new project example in less than five minutes.