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.
I've had ideas for side-projects before, but most times I never actually went to building them because I got too scared of holding private data (sometimes sensitive information such as financial data).
I thought of just building offline apps for the browser and letting the user sync data using Dropbox or some competitor, but never found an open source project to facilitate that kind of thing (an actual db that syncs through Dropbox). I also heard that locally storing a Dropbox token in the browser could be dangerous (assuming an offline-app-for-the-browser architecture, for example), which meant I'd have to build actual native apps. But then, isn't it dangerous to store a token in the OS as well?
I might never build a side project. But damn, I wish there weren't bad people willing to steal data out there.
I do have one, it helps a lot with config files. I also tried versioning some bash scripts there to install stuff, but the latter doesn't feel quite right.
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/ [2] https://crdt.tech/ [3] https://github.com/vlcn-io/cr-sqlite