odoyle-rules VS RxDB

If you're going down this route I'd second the recommendation for O'Doyle Rules. (Haven't used it since I switched away from SPAs altogether, but when I was investigating stuff in that space, O'Doyle appeared to be taking the "correct approach" from what I could tell.)

That's what this tiny library does https://github.com/oakes/odoyle-rules

Reactive updates is the big one, in my opinion. DataScript is a triumph and arguably is the reason why so many note-taking tools (Roam, Athens, Logseq, etc) are written in Clojure. But there are so many cases where it would be nice to react when some set of entities is changed.

I think what we need is to figure out how to combine DataScript with a rules engine. I'm wrote a rules engine and made a writeup that compares the two together: "Using O'Doyle Rules as a poor man's DataScript" https://github.com/oakes/odoyle-rules/blob/master/bench-src/...

Subscribing to individual entities is nice but with a rules engine you have so much more fine-grained control over your reactions. And with the RETE algorithm this can be done efficiently. Most libraries in this space just ignore it and make their own ad-hoc solution -- an informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a rules engine.

Odoyle-rules lets you write rules (forwards chaining) engine that you can run on client and server. There are a couple ways you can twist that idea to achieve a more unified system.

I suspect it'd be too much of a mismatch to be useful, but i haven't thought about it enough. I think a more promising idea is to try implementing a database with o'doyle. I wrote about my first attempt here: Using O'Doyle Rules as a poor man's DataScript Right now it would be too inefficient for large data sets because it has to constantly rebuild its index but i think with some small changes i could improve that and basically turn o'doyle into a tool for creating databases that come with reactivity for free.

No doubt there's a runtime cost in joining the facts together, so naturally a system that lumps facts together into records (like clara) will have to do fewer joins, and should be faster. I figured out that i could at least deduplicate my joins with derived facts as i explained here, which ended up being a really big perf boost. But there's still a tradeoff, and one where almost everyone should favor flexibility, i think.

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)