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Keynote: What changes when we go offline-first?

A talk at Velocity London, London, UK, 02 Nov 2018

Abstract

We all know how to build web apps around a central server. However, clients — especially mobile clients — are not always online and thus can’t always reach the server. Increasingly, we want to develop apps in which the user can still get work done while offline, and to sync their data the next time an Internet connection is available.

We call such apps “offline-first”. However, in the offline-first world there is an issue that is not so often talked about: moving from server-centric to offline-first deeply changes the programming model. For example, if several users each change the data while offline, how do you merge them back together again?

In this talk, Martin will show how recent computer science research is helping develop the abstractions and APIs for the next generation of applications.