I’ve been recently reading about tools like htmx and Hotwire Turbo. These frameworks rely on sending HTML, not JSON, over the wire, with a focus on graceful degradation and reduced custom client-side JavaScript code. The simplicity is tantalising!

To learn more about this tech, I re-wrote my Obfuscator project using htmx. You can find the latest incarnation here, with source code on GitHub. The functionality of Obfuscator remains the same as ever: it translates some user-entered text through multiple languages in sequence, returning the result in the original language.

Then and now

The first version of Obfuscator was written in PHP and used the Bing Translate API, but I had no server to host it on an ongoing basis. The second version was a React/Redux setup which ran on AWS Lambda plus AWS Machine Translation. It had 174 runtime dependencies for what basically amounts to a simple form with five inputs and a button.

The latest verion is hosted on CloudFlare Pages, my preferred static host these days. There’s no framework or additional third-party dependencies to be seen here—just htmx at runtime, plus TypeScript and CloudFlare’s CLI for development (thankfully, the CLI wraps all the build shenanigans for backend code). I enjoyed writing a fairly stripped-back frontend in vanilla HTML. As for the backend: it’s amazing how painless writing serverless backend code has become with the likes of Netlify and CloudFlare Pages Functions, compared to when I first wrote Obfuscator in 2016. I was even able use CloudFlare for translation using the m2m100 model which is surfaced as part of CloudFlare Workers AI. It’s certainly slower and less accurate than Amazon’s offering, but is much cheaper with a perpetual free tier. Besides, accurate translation was never really the point!