[cdata]

I had the pleasure of meeting Mikeal on a few occasions, but mainly I've benefited from his work over the years (initially via the JavaScript ecosystem, and later through the Protocol Labs community).

PouchDB was way ahead of its time, and I'm just now coming around to how crazy cool it was and is compared to most other tech in its space.

He made a great deal of positive impact on technical areas I care about. Rest in peace.

[swyx]

just learning about pouchdb now. why did it not take off you think?

[diggan]

Around 2016 sometimes, a small team (me included) built a "mini" version of our main product (Typeform) which was using PouchDB for syncing forms/answers between the backend and the mobile app (written with Phonegap/Cordova if I remember correctly), mainly so we could have offline capabilities.

Everything worked fine, and was cool to launch something like that since I'm not a mobile developer by any measure. But PouchDB required using CouchDB for the syncing, which was both the first document DB we deployed in our production infrastructure, and the only use case for having CouchDB at all, so we didn't have lots of expertise about it.

I think managing CouchDB ended up being the biggest maintenance hassle at one point, as it was kind of an extra piece, compared to the "real" setup that hosted the other production data. AFAIK, there was no experts on CouchDB at the company either.

So I guess in the end if this "frontend sync library" you're want to use also ends up dictating the backend storage/engine, then make sure you can "afford" a completely new and standalone piece for just that. Unless you're already using CouchDB, then it seems like a no-brainer.

Probably today I'd cobble together something "manually" with Postgres and WebSockets/SSE instead if I was looking to do the same thing again.

[k__]

I remember 2017, at offline camp, I proposed talking about using offline first libraries with existing backends. Nobody, was interested. Seems the people interested in such tech were pretty much sold on CouchDB.

Just now, almost a decade later, we get libraries like Tinybase and SignalDB.

[neom]

In addition to the sync issues mentioned, personally I think overcoming the browsers was the real issues. Nobody wanted to support this, the security would have been a contrived nightmare.