SyncedStore VS RxDB

This article has been quite the inspiration for many projects and progress on this front. I think we're seeing more and more developments around CRDTs and local-first frameworks / applications.

I'm working on a few projects in this area:

- https://www.typecell.org - Notion meets Notebook-style live programming for TypeScript / React

- https://www.blocknotejs.org - a rich text editor built on TipTap / Prosemirror that supports Yjs for local-first collaboration

- https://syncedstore.org - a wrapper around Yjs for easier development

In my experience so far, some things get more complicated when building a local-first application, and some things get a lot easier. What gets easier is that once you've modeled and implemented the data-layer (which does require you to rethink / unlearn a few principles), you don't need to worry about data-fetching, errors etc. as much as in a regular "API-based" app.

Another interesting video I recommend on this topic is about Linear's "Sync Engine" which employs some of the local-first techniques as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo2m3jaJixU

Hi! Great questions :)

First of all, SyncedStore does not implement any CRDT algorithms. Credits for this go to Yjs [1] (and its author Kevin), which it uses as underlying CRDT.

Yjs and Automerge are (afaik) the two most commonly used CRDT implementations. Both have their pros and cons, but Yjs has focused a lot on performance [2].

Automerge has a bit friendlier "Immer style" [3] API. I'm not too familiar with @localfirst/state, but it seems to add a Redux style API on top of Automerge.

My approach with SyncedStore was really to provide an API on top of Yjs that's as simple as possible to use in React / Vue / Svelte or plain JS app. I.e.: only use a single React Hook to observe changes, and use regular Javascript assigments to update values. The API is inspired mostly by Reactive Programming libraries such as MobX [4] (from the same author as Immer).

Hope you're still following along :) Maybe it helps to compare the TODO-MVC applications, as both SyncedStore (https://github.com/YousefED/SyncedStore/tree/main/examples) and @localfirst/state (https://github.com/local-first-web/state/tree/main/examples/...) have implemented these as examples!

[1]: https://github.com/yjs/yjs

I’m exploring the ideas (an easy to use framework to build local-first [1] apps) in my library Reactive-CRDT (https://github.com/yousefed/reactive-crdt). Feedback welcome!

All credit for the underlying tech to YJS, which has been amazing as mentioned by others in this thread.

[1]: https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html

I'm interested in this problem also!

I think there is a large overlap with projects that market/focus on offline-first experiences.

AFAIK this problem can be solved by:

1) Considering a client-side copy of the database that gets synced with the remote DB. This is an approach [PowerSync](https://www.powersync.com/) and [ElectricSql](https://electric-sql.com/) and [rxdb](https://rxdb.info/) take!

Hey, after I posted that, I went and gave a second look online to see if I could find something that would allow me to develop a local-first app with offline persistence and syncing capabilities.

I ended up finding some possibilities out there that could potentially help me build stuff. One of them is RxDB [1], which offers WebRTC syncing - you'd still need a signaling server, I suppose, but all sensitive information could be synced E2E-encrypted via WebRTC.

Then there's CRDT's [2], which is a universe that turned out to have multiple possibilities that match (at least partially) my needs. In particular, the next thing I want to take a look at is cr-sqlite [3], which might be just thing I needed to kick-off some side-projects.

I'm posting here cause I just found some hope of not needing to build a traditional client-server app and having to deal with all the hassle involved in securing a server (and with fear that my efforts could be not good enough), and I thought someone else could benefit from getting to know these things.

[1] https://rxdb.info/

About a year ago, I discovered a cool offline-first framework called RxDB. Initially, I thought that on the frontend side, this was exactly what I had been searching for over the past years. After tinkering around and even using it in production for some time, I realized that it wasn't well-suited for my intended use. RxDB was initially created as an RxJS layer for PouchDB with a server replication interface. Over time, other storage types besides PouchDB were introduced (e.g., IndexedDB, SQLite) and the replication interface became more sophisticated. The replication interface is really cool and exactly what I wanted. The biggest problem I have with RxDB is that it is so tightly coupled with RxJS. While RxJS is technically very powerful, it offers a dreadful developer experience. It's really hard to understand at first and integrating it into an existing codebase, which isn't using RxJS, is tedious.

Congrats to the team. Once I’ve tried https://rxdb.info/ and it wasn’t funny at all to do the remote replication (PG) and to deal with conflicts. I do need to check this out!

RxDB (Open Source but paid plugins)