vaxine VS RxDB

Hi HN, James, Valter, Sam and the team from ElectricSQL here.

We're really excited to be sharing ElectricSQL with you today. It's an open source, local-first sync layer that can be used to build reactive, realtime, offline-capable apps directly on Postgres with two way active-active sync to SQLite (including with WASM in the browser).

Electric comprises a sync layer (built with Elixir) placed in front of your Postgres database and a type safe client that allows you to bidirectionally sync data from your Postgres to local SQLite databases. This sync is CRDT-based, resilient to conflicting edits from multiple nodes at the same time, and works after being offline for extended periods.

Some good links to get started:

- website: https://electric-sql.com

- docs: https://electric-sql.com/docs

- code: https://github.com/electric-sql/electric

- introducing post: https://electric-sql.com/blog/2023/09/20/introducing-electri...

You can also see some demo applications:

- Linear clone: https://linear-lite.electric-sql.com

- Realtime demo: https://electric-sql.com/docs/intro/multi-user

- Conflict-free offline: https://electric-sql.com/docs/intro/offline

The Electric team actually includes two of the inventors of CRDTs, Marc Shapiro and Nuno Preguiça, and a number of their collaborators who've pioneered a lot of tech underpinning local-first software. We are privileged to be building on their research and delighted to be surfacing so much work in a product you can now try out.

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)