[mbalex99]

Max, CoFounder of Ditto here.

Super cool to see us on HN! The use cases are for projects, products, enterprises to build collaborative apps that can sync with the internet but fall back to local P2P connections when internet connectivity fails. Furthermore we added offline first as an additional guard for some resiliency.

We help solve a class of apps like:

1. Desk-less worker apps for the enterprise: think people who use mobile apps for the vast majority of their work: pilots, flight attendants, construction, maintenance 2. Retail, inventory warehousing, point of sale systems where being able to communicate between kiosks, service tablets, and display systems quickly even if there are interruptions in service 3. Education: it’s very often parents give their kids phones without a data plan, so their school or learning apps need to be able to collaborate with other students or teachers regardless of connectivity 4. Robotics, agriculture technology, IoT - often these applications have hard requirements to communicate with other local devices without any dependency of the internet

I can keep going!

Again, So happy to see us on HN! Thank you!

[brodouevencode]

We are in the process of buying it for retail applications (just signed the paperwork) and so far so good. I would ask that you make the documentation a little easier to find from the home page. Engineers want things to be easy ya know :).

EDIT: is there ever a plan to open this as a spec?

[mbalex99]

Thanks!! We will make improvements.

Our replication system is very complex. I am not sure that even publishing our spec would get much usage because it’s so complex.

But maybe we can open source an API?

[m0meni]

One thing I don't fully understand is how KV stores like this fit into the overall architecture of an app. Is Ditto supposed to completely replace SQL or is there some Ditto DB <-> SQL DB syncing mechanism happening?

[bigfish24]

Adam (Ditto cofounder) - Ditto can be used either as the primary datastore in the client app (we call these "Small Peers"), or alongside others local DBs (existing apps adopting Ditto tend to pick off key P2P features and run Ditto with others like Couchbase, SQLite, or Core Data - and we have built connectors to help with this). With regards to the backend, our server product, or "Big Peer" provides webhooks or a Kafka topic of all changes to pipe them into other systems, so it similarly can be a primary datastore or middleware.

All-in-all, the design of Ditto is to be flexible so users can add Ditto to their architecture as easy as possible.