What is Local first development(alexop.dev) |
What is Local first development(alexop.dev) |
Semantic sync (for example when 2 people have modified a draft of a novel and want to sync): how to auto sync both versions so the resulting text makes sense and has no duplicates, is indeed much harder, and requires manual revisions (like git revisions), possibly with LLM suggestions.
That's also not typically the best way to sync one's concrete data models, and if your data has any sort of structure, you can likely produce a merge operation that works Well Enough™ in practice
mmm, yes, i see
edit: to be clear, local first is interesting in theory, but I need a little more than draw the rest of the fucking owl.
What is Local-first Web Development?
Here some info: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Storage_API...
There is also a discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39222328
You can use the file system API as an alternative, which is permanent, but it's slow, requires the user to remember where the file was stored, and not recommended for things such as databases.
This makes the whole purpose of it a bit pointless in my opinion. What is your experience with it?
I had to laugh very hard at the "revolutionary approach". How is it revolutionary, if software was developed "local-first" for decades?
Techbros really do come up with the oldest ideas and call them revolutionary.
Also it's very hard to follow up bugs or other errors if users are often offline. I giess you can queue up errors being sent and so on but still. Syncing means that you probably have to have a complicated logic, especially if the data you are seeing can be modified by others. How do you solve merge conflicts?
I really like offline first web apps, but it is way harder and more expensive to build I think. For a startup it means more time before you can deploy your app and where I live there is pretty much fast internet everywhere so it kinda is solving an issue that very few customers will face.
Revolutions always have been the young one's business for a reason, I guess.
Its only issue was that it was a massive pain to type by hand and no good GUI editors really emerged.
And some developers didn't understand the format and shoved stuff into attributes that should've been elements and vice versa.
The current state of the art here is git. So we're basically talking about making git automatic and easy to use for the majority of the population. That's not something we've been "doing for decades".
Really can't see how this can be regarded as a recent idea.
Techbros really do come up with the oldest ideas and call them revolutionary.
— bill wurtz, 2017, in the video "history of the entire world, i guess"
Merge conflicts are truly the only unsolved issue and for good reasons. Notably offline IDEs work together with on-demand-online version control software to solve this problem, and also have been since forever. Hard part is getting non-text data to merge; you usually implement file-level checkout/checkin logic (see perforce, sharepoint, etc.)
People do have higher expectations on software than they used to have. There are also other issues with syncable states than the OP wrote about. Just imagine that you upgrade your api, you will have to be very backwards compatible for a long time or force users to update their web apps when they come online again.
It's easy to mess up service workers and it's possible to put stuff in a state which is almost unable to recover from unless the users affected clear their cache and then risk losing all of their data. Stuff like that can't happen with a normal web app.
While all of these things are certainly possible, I also do think that the development time is longer. You will have a hard time to compete with businesses that don't care about local first stuff since they can pump out features in a higher rate than you can because you have to care about states in a much deeper sense.
It makes sense for some apps to be local first, but not really for that many imho.
Sometimes, I feel so old. Recently, I read about a junior dev who did not understand that you can build websites that aren't SPAs and was confused when Chrome's debugger cleared itself on a page reload.
People have been charging users for offline apps since before "offline" was a concept that needed to exist because back then, everything* was offline.
* with exceptions.
Let users pay a price to download the application, do some magic key activation (that could work offline too) like countless of professional software? Ableton, Spine2D and Cascadeur are some recent software I've purchased that works just like that.
> Syncing means that you probably have to have a complicated logic, especially if the data you are seeing can be modified by others.
Yeah, I think if you have an existing application/architecture/design and you try to shoehorn in local-first with sync in there, there will be some additional work. But if you design your data structures with that in mind, it gets a lot easier. So as always, way easier for greenfield projects than migrating existing ones.
> How do you solve merge conflicts?
Depends on your application. In many cases, CRDTs (just one example) can automatically resolve things based on however you set it up. And for when that doesn't work and you need manual solving, that gets easier too as you can easily see exactly where it doesn't merge, and it gets a lot easier to build the tooling you'd expose to the user to resolve it.
You are so optimistic about browser's garbage collector! What you have said is possible, but I need a whole computer devoted to use some web-browser software in such a way. Any another web-page can make the "system" to crash and bye-bye foreverness.
It was better 10 years ago when I could buy a 1-day trial to some expensive newspaper, then open all the long-reads and read everything effectively free. Now any web-page tries to be very much smarter than the user and I would rather never use any proprietary "app" for not even seeing what the vendor has prepared to such a digital scavenger.
Charge users to buy the product. Don't charge users to use the product. I know it's a revolutionary way to think.
> Also it's very hard to follow up bugs or other errors if users are often offline.
Yes, so?
> I giess you can queue up errors being sent and so on but still.
Have you asked the user if they want those errors, which often contain private information, to be sent?
> Syncing means that you probably have to have a complicated logic, especially if the data you are seeing can be modified by others. How do you solve merge conflicts?
There's tens, if not hundreds, of solutions to sync. Why don't you take a look at one of the existing solutions?
> I really like offline first web apps
Really? It sounded like you wanted to charge users and didn't like the idea of users going offline. Kind've hypocritical to then say you like offline-first.
> more expensive to build I think.
Not at all. You should be building and deploying in containers. Containers can and should be 100% local first. You download the dependencies (`FROM` statements) and then disconnect from wifi. If you can't build after that then you're doing it wrong.
> For a startup it means more time before you can deploy your app
Not if you're doing it right.
> where I live there is pretty much fast internet everywhere
I'm happy for you! Unfortunately you seem to be the type of person who wants to reduce cost. That means remote workers. Remote workers often live where their internet is very sub-par and/or metered. Local-first (and especially offline-first) will help reduce cost even more.
> it kinda is solving an issue that very few customers will face
I assume you're in the USA. You shouldn't take the FCC's connectivity reports at face value especially after certain people have gutted the FCC's ability to provide reliable connectivity data. You also shouldn't assume that every customer around you has access to fast internet because, unfortunately, last-mile internet service providers have a tendency of monopolistically abusing their customers.
If you're not in the USA... well I'd still be willing to bet that you're wrong unless your customers are exclusively in an urban environment.
Here's an overview: https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/02/Email-driven-git.html
The always-online apps bring a lot that is not possible with such software, even simple stuff like editing the same file at the same time. Try that with tools like Dropbox and you'll get conflicts that you need to resolve. It's totally possible to get offline software if you either give up on many features or accept complicated conflict resolution etc. The basic options are either immutability, like email, or conflict resolution, like git. This is about not making those sacrifices.
"Local first" is a misnomer and that misnomer does probably reflect the different experience of youngsters, but if you can get past that there is something new here that is interesting and challenging.
Dont even get me started on the mess that was serialisation and deserialization.
It was awful, overengineered design-by-committee mess.
This was only obvious to me in retrospect after I realized that these things didnt have to be complicated.
RRELAX NG, perhaps?
In those good old times both Oxygen and XML Spy were good enough, so I even purchased a license of Oxygen for myself and never felt the money were wasted.
>And some developers didn't understand the format and shoved stuff into attributes that should've been elements and vice versa.
This happened at such scale where we can say that it was UX problem of XML itself.
That's just a matter of training. They were trained that way. 30 years ago users were trained to "save often".
I agree, but I don't think dev time is longer due to some intrinsic reality that local-first is technically harder. Nearly 2 decades of work has been put towards tailoring building blocks for SaaS systems. Similar building blocks can be made for local-first.
Again, syntactically possible, semantically harder, but it depends on your use-case plus additional constraints (eg max offline time). Maybe not a fully automatic system, but still very useful.
Next best thing is keeping conflicts unresolved, but marked as such as a first-class citizen of the document content (see pijul, jj).
For offline-first, the user would be alerted that someone changed the record(s) while you changed them as well and ask what to do. In attempts to make these things for an offline first healthcare app which is mostly structured records based, I found that it is very rare for 2 (or more) to work on the same data, but I guess it really depends on the use case and with unstructured data it's not a nice way of working.
The example I’m familiar with is assets in the video games industry. Everyone used Perforce (or maybe SVN) and artists/designers lock the 3D model or whatever they’re editing. People ask each other to give up a lock all the time.
There are few sync strategies worse than "you worked hard on this, but now you have to choose to either throw away your change or everyone else's changes". May any product doing that fail miserably.