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Your web app but good: Aaron Boodman (Local-First Conf)

Local-First Conf · 8.3K views · 2024-07-01 · 19:36

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Overview

Aaron Boodman of Replicache asks why sync engines have not yet fixed web app complexity and what is missing for them to go mainstream. The talk lays out the ideas that led to the Zero sync engine.

On Hacker News

Cited in sync-engine threads as the origin story for Zero and for hybrid local and remote queries.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2024–2025

Topics

Web developmentSoftware architecture & designDatabases & storage
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local-firstzeroreplicachesyncweb apps

What people said

trosterud · 2024-12 · Strong recommendation

Nice! Congratz It's insanely fast. And wholeheartedly recommend this wonderful talk about the thoughts that led to this: [VIDEO]

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aboodman · 2025-03 · Reference

Zero (zerosync.dev) uses transactional conflict resolution, which is what our prior product Replicache and Reflect both used. It is very similar to what multiplayer games have done for decades. It is described here: [LINK] It works really well and we and our customers have found it to be quite general. It allows you to run an arbitrary transaction on the sever side to decide what to do in case of conflicts. It is the software equivalent of git asking the user what to do. Zero asks your code what to do. But it asks it in the form of the question "please run the function named x with these inputs on the current backend db state". Which is a much more ergonomic way to ask it than "please do a 3-way merge between these three states". Conflict resolution is not the reason why there has not been a general-purpose sync engine. None of our customers have ~ever complained about conflict resolution. The reason there has not been a general-purpose sync engine is actually on the read side: - Previous sync engines really want you to sync all data. This is impractical for most apps. - Previous sync engines do not have practical approaches to permissions. These problems are being solved in next generation of sync engines. For more on this, I talk about it some here: [VIDEO]

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ochiba · 2025-03 · Reference

I think that is where sync engines come in that allow doing arbitrary hybrid queries (across local and remote data) and then keeping the results of those hybrid queries in sync on the client. This is one of the ideas that appears to be central to the genesis of Zero [1] ElectricSQL allows for a similar pattern and PowerSync is also working on this [2] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]

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Sources

Video by Local-First Conf, played through YouTube.

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