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Comment by aboodman | Hacker News Reader

Hi Hacker News!

I'm starting a new company attempting to solve the offline-first / mobile-sync problem once and for all.

Replicache makes your mobile, web, or desktop application blazingly responsive, by buffering all reads and writes to a local cache (aka "offline-first").

This is something I've been thinking about on and off for over fifteen years, on major projects at Google as well as my previous vc-backed startup. I previously thought there was no satisfying general solution, but happy to say I think I was wrong: Replicache is pretty dang easy, and it works with any existing stack.

We're looking for groups to partner with would like early access. If that sounds interesting, please reach out!

- Aaron

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Sorry, no technical comments but a UI one: Please change the font/style. Depending on monitor color settings, the paragraph text in Retina Thin is really hard to read, but even on my other monitor it’s still a problem with the letter "s" [0]. I think it’s a problem with the thinness and white on dark background. It was hurting my eyes and permanently distracting me while trying to read the copy.

[0]: https://i.imgur.com/Ia0roKn.png

Thank you for this feedback, I'll ask our designer for his advice. Perhaps we can detect high density monitors and only do Retina in that case or something.

I've written my own version of this for a couple projects but it's not 100%

Would love to be part of the early access and see how Replicache fares

Great, sign up here: https://replicache.typeform.com/to/eDbYYL!

We'll be going through shortly to find the next set of folks to test with.

How does it compare to CouchDB/RxDb, or Gun?

CouchDB, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22175530

RxDB:

- Doesn't guarantee convergence. It's up to the developer to provide a feed of deltas to the client and ensure they have the correct effect when applied to the client. This is the one of the hardest parts!

- Provides no help with conflict resolution. Push replication just pushes the new version of each document. The server must figure out how the document differs from the stored version and what that must mean in terms of logical operations.

- Implemented in JavaScript. Difficult to use in native apps.

I'm not up to date with Gun (it has gone through many iterations), but I think it is currently trying to be a masterless system which means the same concerns as with CRDTs apply.

RxDB maker here.

You can do conflict-resolution by subscribing to the changeFeed and when multiple versions with the same revision-height exist, you create a new version with a 'merged' document. Depending on your dataset this can be tricky and painful.

RxDB can only be used with javascript and will likely ever be.

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