@Geoffrey Litt and collaborators have published Building data-centric apps with a reactive relational database https://riffle.systems/essays/prelude My understanding of this approach is that you replace all (most of?) your data structures and ad-hoc data sync/copy code within an app with relational tables. IOW, all state (even UI state) is put in a app-wide relational database with well defined queries between tables that automatically trigger on updates. Very interesting approach.

Its really cool. I just read it. This is supposed to be how you architect Firestore driven apps, they are also a local cache + live queries, but having SQL is maybe more expressive, however, they then go on to say SQL was getting in the way so maybe NoSQL is a better fit for apps? Its interesting.... in the shower today I was thinking of putting firebase as a virtual table on sqllite so you can use SQL over Firebase which would land in a similar place I think, it was interesting to see this today.

That's how Eve worked 🙂

@Tom Larkworthy they say SQL as a language is not great for many things. I agree with that. They're not suggesting NoSQL, but rather a different language to query the same relational model.

Haven't read this article in full, but generally love the idea. I really hope it's a part of the future of mainstream UI programming. It reminds me of the Entity-Component architecture for games, which you can think of as making each "entity" in the game be basically a primary key, and hanging other bits of game logic off that ID, encapsulated in "components". (Implementation strategies are... manifold, so it's hard to give a good reference, but the best explanation I've seen of the idea behind ECS is Catherine West's RustConf 2018 keynote; I think it'll be comprehensible even if you don't know Rust)

I am familiar with ECS too and its orthogonal to reactivity IMHO. The classic game loop is a bunch a systems applied to mutable lists in lockstep. Its explicitly anti reactive because in games its too easy to cause circular self-triggering loops. I love ECS for its extendability, and you could probably make a reactive ECS system, but the programming feeling is quite different. Its very easy to connect reactive systems in unhealthy loops on the other hand....

Sure, not so much the reactivity as the "app state is (like) a relational database" part. If nothing else, convergent evolution is a strong sign the idea is a good one.

you do not need extra sqlite to turn a ui into a database, actually vue framework itself can be thought as a database, and query from vue directly, checkout my library https://vue-db.js.org/

cc @Chet Corcos