Conversation

✨ Wrote an essay about Riffle, a new project I've been working on w/

and Daniel Jackson! Guiding question: could we simplify app dev w/ a new kind of reactive local-first database? Here's why I'm excited about this work:

riffle.systems

Building data-centric apps with a reactive relational database

We're exploring an approach to simplifying app development: storing all application and UI state in a client-side reactive relational database that provides a structured dataflow model.

109

534

Replying to

and

great essay! I like the idea of stack compression. Seems like the way to go here is to build up from the database. What if Postgres came with UI building blocks? and all you could do was write CSS. you could build new UI blocks but it'd have to start from the DB

Replying to

and

Yeah, this is pretty close to the first thing we tried! I think the main difficulty is that SQL is a pretty rough language for this (... flashbacks to trying to do SQL metaprogramming just to control sort order). I'd love to try this with a non-SQL relational language, though

Replying to

and

i'm definitely not a postgres export but i know there are materialized views. What if SQL included the view? SELECT <VerticalStack>{name, birthdate, location AS <View>loc: ?</View>}</VerticalStack> FROM users

Replying to

crazy thoughts but just thinking out loud 😁

Replying to

and

Oh yeah, I totally see that: this query is super close to something we wrote on a whiteboard at some point. Somehow the devil is in the details with SQL. So far it's been a pain just to get it to return JSON, never mind React-style templates.

7:37 PM · Mar 2, 2022Twitter Web App

Replying to

I was pretty enthusiastic about do-it-all-in-SQL at first but I think I've come around to the perspective that SQL is just not good at this, for largely the reasons described by

@sc13ts

here: scattered-thoughts.net/writing/agains Maybe there's potential for something compiles to SQL, though.

scattered-thoughts.net

Against SQL