matlin
Joined 9 years ago
Karma
563
Submissions
211
Member since
Feb 14
Making Triplit - the fullstack database (https://triplit.dev)
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
More niche use case but this would be awesome for communicating between contexts in web app (e.g. web worker, iframe, etc)
Comment · 1 year ago
With React Native yes but not yet with Swift. There's been quite a few requests to my surprise through--I figured CloudKit, etc would be sufficient on iOS but I don't have experience there.
Comment · 1 year ago
Great catch, fixed!
Comment · 1 year ago
PouchDB and CouchDB were what inspired me to build Triplit[1]. The idea of having an identical (or merely similar in the case of Pouch/Couch) query engine accessible on client and server is insanely powerful.
The author links to a much longer post on handling conflicts which is worthy of its length because it's not a pleasant experience with this setup.
I highly recommend trying a modern setup from one of the many new local first solutions [2]
Comment · 1 year ago
My ideal version of this is simple: just define the queries you want (no matter how complex) and the you'll get exactly the data you need to fulfill those queries, no more, no less. And the cherry on top would be to have your queries update automatically with changes both locally and remote in close to real-time.
That's basically what we're doing with Triplit (https://triplit.dev), be it, not with SQL--which is a plus for most developers.
Comment · 1 year ago
You should check out Triplit as well, we have React Native support[0] and the best Typescript integration by far
Comment · 2 years ago
We apply incremental, streamable "joins" (relational queries) for real-time syncing between application client and server. I think much of the initial research in this space was around data pipelines but the killer app (no pun intended) is actually in app development
Comment · 2 years ago
I've used React Native quite a bit in the past and I gotta say I wish it didn't have to exist at all.
It's often times fine on iOS and then incredibly slow on Android. Hermes is very exciting but still requires many polyfills to make simple NPM packages work. I hope one day, the web (and embedding web apps on mobile) makes React Native fully obsolete.
Comment · 2 years ago
I've made just this!
Docs for it: https://www.triplit.dev/docs/frameworks/tanstack-router#exam...
It by default uses IndexedDB but can also use SQLite but does real time, relational querying and (optionally) syncs with you server.
Re: developer ergonomics, this is our primary focus so I don't love to get your feedback on!
Comment · 2 years ago
A lot of the newer local first systems, like Triplit (biased because I work on it), support partial replication so only the requested/queried data is sent and subscribed to on the client.
The other issue of relying on a just the server to build these highly collaborative apps is you can't wait for a roundtrip to the server for each interaction if you want it to feel fast. Sure you can for those rare cases where your user is on a stable Wifi network, on a fast connection, and near their data; however, a lot computing is now on mobile where pings are much much higher than 10ms and on top of that when you have two people collaborating from different regions, someone will be too far away to rely on round trips.
Ultimately, you're going to need a client caching component (at least optimistic mutations) so you can either lean into that or try to create a complicated mess where all of your logic needs to be duplicated in the frontend and backend (potentially in different programming languages!).
The best approach IMO (again biased to what Triplit does) is to have the same query engine on both client and server so the exact query you use to get data from your central server can also be used to resolve from the clients cache.
Comment · 2 years ago
You'd probably enjoy Triplit then--especially if you're using Typescript.