clientdb VS wundergraph

Replicache (https://replicache.dev/) and clientdb (https://clientdb.dev/) are the only productized versions of this architecture I'm aware of (please do let me know if anyone is aware of others!).

But the architecture itself has been used successfully in a bunch of apps, most notable of which is probably Linear (https://linear.app/docs/offline-mode, I remember watching an early video of their founder explaining the architecture in more detail but I can't seem to find it anymore).

Basically the way authorization works is you define specific mutations that are supported and allowed, with a client-side and server-side implementation. The client side gets applied optimistically and then sync'ed and ran on the server, which applies authorization rules and detects and handles conflicts, which can result in client state getting rolled back. Replicache has a good writeup here: https://doc.replicache.dev/how-it-works#the-big-picture

This looks really cool, love seeing more innovation in this space!

At first glance this seems to be mostly targeted towards single-user apps where each user would have their own database that can be sync'ed to a remote server, but still isolated from data for other users, similar to the CouchDB+PouchDB model?

At least it looks that way since I couldn't see anything around authorization and conflict resolution. Not that there's anything wrong with focusing on this use case, a lot of apps can function perfectly fine this way.

A few other interesting new players:

https://replicache.dev/

https://clientdb.dev/

I never really got graphql until I stumbled upon Wundergraph. (https://github.com/wundergraph/wundergraph). I have no affiliation with them except that I have been building an app with it. I'm honestly puzzled how it's not more popular. Maybe people are solving these problems in other ways? But I tried out a bunch of stuff: Vapor, Supabase, Hasura, etc. None of it simplifies building complex systems the way WG does.

I think their takes on graphql make sense: https://wundergraph.com/blog/graphql_is_not_meant_to_be_expo...

To demonstrate field usage metrics in Federation, I’ll be using WunderGraph Cosmo — a fully open source, fully self-hostable platform for Federation V1/V2 that is a drop in replacement for Apollo GraphOS.

The inverse is also true. As a technical founder, and maybe even an introvert like me, you should definitely look for a non-technical co-founder who can help you with networking, etc... I found my dream co-founder through YC Co-founder match and what can I say, it's going great. We're focusing on enterprise GraphQL/API solutions (https://wundergraph.com) and I benefit from the networking and communication abilities of Stefan, while I answer all technical questions. Tldr, I highly recommend to team up with people who complement your skills.

GraphQL Gateway is primarily responsible for serving GraphQL queries to consumers. It takes a query from a client, breaks it into smaller sub-queries, and executes that plan by proxying calls to the appropriate downstream subgraphs. When we started our journey, there was only Apollo Federation in the arena, and we used it. Still, now you can look at other options (e.g. Mercurius, Conductor, Hot Chocolate, Wundergraph, Hasura Remote Schemas), compare benchmarks and decide what's important and preferable for your needs. The Gateway provides a unified API for consumers while giving backend engineers flexibility and service isolation.

I'm a big fan of tRPC. It's amazing how it pushed TypeScript only stacks to the limit in terms of DX. Additionally, it made the GraphQL community aware of the limitations and tradeoffs of the Query language. At the same time, I think tRPC went through a really fast hype cycle and it doesn't look like we're seeing a massive move away from REST and GraphQL to RPC. That said, we see a lot of interest in RPC these days as we've adopted some ideas from tRPC and the old NextJS. In our BFF framework (https://wundergraph.com/) we've combined file based routing with RPC. In addition to tRPC, we're automatically generating a JSON Schema for each operation and an OpenAPI spec for the whole set of operations. People quite like this approach because you can easily share a set of RPC endpoints as an OpenAPI spec or postman collection. In addition, there are no discussions around HTTP verbs and such, there's only really queries, mutations and subscriptions. I'm curious what other people's experiences are with GraphQL, REST and RPC style APIs? What are you using these days and how many people/teams are involved/using your apis?

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