Building local-first apps

… is incredibly difficult!

• Local-first Software (Ink & Switch)

• CouchDB

• Dolt, a SQL database with Git-style versioning

Event sourcing approaches

• Building offline-first web and mobile apps using event-sourcing – Living structure – Blog by @flpvsk
• Building a collaborative React app with Flushout | William Saar’s dev blog
• Blog post on Superhuman’s approach
• Blog post on Quip’s approach
• Detailed Design | Replicache Docs

“0data”

i.e. an approach which advocates for data stored entirely locally, and in servers under your control.

• Zero Data App
• rosano (Rosano) · GitHub
• remoteStorage.js — remoteStorage.js 2.0.0-beta.0 documentation

Just using the file system

• speed of lstat
  • Git Speed · GitHub
  • was able to stat 50k files on my computer in <200ms!
  • writing 50k small files took 6.3s
• GitHub - paulmillr/chokidar: Minimal and efficient cross-platform file watching library
• directory structure - Why does git store objects in directories with the first two characters of the hash? - Stack Overflow
• Storage via GCS:
  • $0.05 / 10k writes or lists
  • $0.004 / 10k reads

Storage

One challenge is that it’s very useful to have a SQL database, but browsers just provide a NoSQL store (IndexedDB).

• sql.js is Emscripten-ified SQLite, but can’t persist changes.
  • to persist: GitHub - jlongster/absurd-sql: sqlite3 in ur indexeddb (hopefully a better backend soon)
• nanoSQL offers an isomorphic interface abstracting several DB layers
  • last updated in ’17? or ’19?