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Perhaps a generous definition of "better"... but some of those genuinely made me laugh!

Disclaimer: I'm the author. But you might be interested in TinyBase.


Thanks I'll give it a look! I guess I really was fishing for someone to make a recommendation and I see you have a lot of backend persistence options which I'm very excited about.

Another issue I have with a lot of the new local first products is that they tend to lock you into a particular database type on the backend, so this is refreshing.


Nice work. Does it take time to hydrate tinybase from indexeddb, or do you mount it directly?

What are your thoughts about search over the store? Hydrate a separate lunr index?

And finally has anybody tried using your syncing over webrtc?


TinyBase looks very promising! Is there a doc or reference you can guide me to, for using TinyBase with Preact.js instead of React?


TinyBase author here if anyone has any questions or comments about this!


TinyBase looks great, I wonder why it's not more popular?

I wonder, you as the author, what would you say the main drawbacks are of tinybase?


A while back I started on an experiment to build a local-first GitHub client: https://github.com/tinyplex/tinyhub

It certainly _seems_ like the GitHub interface should feel more like an 'app', and less a 'site'. Or just me?


> Or just me?

I am just a data set of one, but I disagree. Github the website has worked pretty great for well over a decade at this point. As the author of the post says, it is more recently that some cracks have started to show.


It's main use is for browsing documents.

It's not so much that it isn't an app, but that many of its goals should be similar to browsers.


Author here if anyone would like to ask any questions or offer feedback!


Looks neat as I want to try making a local-first app. Though this seems to require React. Is that the case or will it work with vanilla JS?

Also not yet sure how I'd send an edited sqlite db to a backend like LiteFs—looks like Sqlite3Persister is the interface.


As the other commenter points out, the ui-react (and in turn ui-react-dom) modules are optional so you can run it with full ReactDom, with abstract React (eg React Native), or without React at all.

The way to do that would be to listen to data changes (eg addCellListener) and in the listener just manipulate the DOM directly. Probably a pretty slick approach, performance-wise.

For SQLite, a variety of flavors are supported including things like ElectricSQL, Turso, and PowerSync - which all let you sync back to a server. You might also consider running a ‘client’ on a server that can listen to changes coming through web sockets and persist itself to server storage - but I haven’t written that pattern up yet.

Hopefully you’ll get a chance to try it out in the meantime though!


“ The optional bindings to React and pre-built components let you easily build fully reactive UIs on top of TinyBase.”


Without docs/sample code, optional might as well be required.


The very first demo is React-less and so is this Vite template! Enjoy :)

https://github.com/tinyplex/vite-tinybase


I don’t know what vite is. Should I be interested? (Trying to keep the JS part of my app as simple as possible without a lot of deps.)


It's just a way to get up and running with an app template. But this is the essence of the JS in question: https://github.com/tinyplex/vite-tinybase/blob/main/src/inde...


Thanks!


The way I understood it, this is similar to Firebase? Though Firefox is server side, not client side. So I would have to check out a more fully fledged example to compare them.


Can you compare tiny base to RxDB?


That realtime `/imagine` prompt seems pretty great.


Fantastic travel writing with a couple of real LOLs. The author plays the role of self-aware snob for all it's worth though, I assume hoping that his fellow passengers and Atlantic readers are disjoint sets.


I thought it was barely readable self-indulgent pablum. I can't speak to his fellow passengers on this cruise, but the set of those who cruise and Atlantic readers are not disjointed.


It’s a proof of concept! But hopefully you can see how you could build an app that has content that is both cloud & local, private & shared - and that has users that are both anonymous & authenticated, online & offline.


Yes I know! I gave a talk about this, and it made me nostalgic in a way. https://tripleodeon.com/2022/11/closing-the-gap-between-your...


One of the authors here. Just catching up on the awesome feedback in this thread - thanks!

I just thought this was a fun list of links to put together (like it's 1994!) and TBH I was not expecting quite this degree of positive reception.

Happy to answer any questions!


Question 1: Could you summarize or maybe add a page about it? There's just two lines of text and then a bunch of links. I really can't tell what you're getting at.

The obvious answer to all the questions would be to just create normal software and people can upload/share their files if they want to. That's pretty much how all software works except for SAAS web stuff. I assume you're getting at something different, but it isn't at all clear what it is.

Local/native software has been around for many decades. Long before web software; long before the web itself even existed. What is different about this idea?

Is it some way to make web UIs actually as functional as native applications? Some format to make data from web apps as usable as data from normal applications?


Thanks! Yep, I think we need an about page, and maybe a few pull quotes from the articles. The first article from Ink & Switch is the canonical source of the name and the idea.

I think a lot of web consumer products (and dare I say SaaS too) are these days _not_ on your own computer like they were in the 90's or early 2000s. This isn't a call to return to those days, but it is a reminder that there have been trade offs in moving our productive lives entirely to other people's computers - both in terms of technical performance, but also conceptual ownership and the like. Can we rebalance a little?

So yes, the idea is exactly _not_ new. But a lot of products are built today without considering this tried-and-tested architecture as an option. This site & list of tools is just a friendly reminder that yes, there is another way.


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