Tag: offline-first
RSS FeedLocal-first database: Hypermerge
I’m excited to review Hypermerge, as it was developed by the folks from Ink & Switch who wrote the Local-First Software article. It is designed as a fully peer-to-peer data storage system, and is electron/nodejs-only (no browser support).
The underlying data structure implementation, Automerge, is based the academic research paper A Conflict-Free Replicated JSON Datatype, and can be used independently – in fact there are a couple of different “networking” layers available – but Hypermerge is by far the most well-developed and “production ready”.
Local-first database: remoteStorage.js
remoteStorage.js is a an offline-first solution that’s been around for quite some time, and stands out for having a formal protocol spec, first drafted in 2012. It would be really cool if it took off, but unfortunately there are only one or two commercial providers, and the only stable open-source server implementation is in PHP. There’s one written in rust that has been unmaintained since early 2018, and a nodejs one that has a big warning up top about being experimental & alpha-stage. Still, I figured it would be interesting to see how it stacks up according to my local-first database criteria. You can also look at the evaluation of gun-js to see how it compares.
Technically, “remoteStorage” is the protocol, and “remoteStorage.js” is the “reference client imeplementation”. My goal with this series is to look at solutions that are immediately ready to be used to build apps, so my evaluation is of the javascript client (and a corresponding community-built javascript server). While many of the features of the client & server are inherent to the protocol, there are also many things that are more due to implementation details than the underlying spec. 🤷
In Search of a Local-First Database
I’ve been wrestling with the issue of “data storage that syncs and works offline” for a number of years now, and have gotten 80% of the way on a few different implementations, but always ultimately get stymied by the little things, like “how do I make it not break”.
Recently, I’ve been re-energized in my search by the wonderful Local-first software article by Ink & Switch, and then by James Long’s dotConf talk, CRDTs for Mortals.