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Comment by mattdeboard | Hacker News Reader

I'm not really concerned about React-specific implementation, but rather a data structure that serves as a facade over the storage layer (either a remote server or the storage systems made available to the browser). This way the UI (e.g. React components and other view-like things) just talks to this facade and doesn't have to know anything about the network, its availability, or browser-specific storage options.

Mozilla's localForage is a good tool specifically for abstracting away the client-side storage mechanism from the UI logic. Aside from that I have looked at Flux and its stores would be the place where you would implement such a facade.

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I've used PouchDB this way in the past, and it worked well for seamlessly enabling offline use/hiding network concerns from the view layer, but it's probably a lot "thicker" than what you have in mind (and isn't completely browser-proof, and requires the server storage to look like a CouchDB).

It's interesting to imagine what the lighter facade you're describing might look like. I guess you'd want the controllers/views to get a key-value style interface, and you'd want the facade to connect with one or more local storage options, and some sort of logic to manage triage between local and remote storage, and syncing between the two, and a well-defined API for connecting the remote storage. Hmmm...

Well, Fb gave a presentation that said interaction with their web utils (so storage if you want to call it that) actually happens in the action itself, with pending, success and failure "actions" (events really) being dispatches to the stores. Not sure what that means for your facade, but it's confusing the hell out of me. What is the store supposed to do? Just hold onto the state, period?

not sure if i am following you, but in my apps, the data is always in React state. Whether it came from network or from localstorage is irrelevant. There is some code somewhere that loads data into React state from whatever source. All react is doing is rendering views as a fn of state.

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