Hacker News Reader

Comment by unit91 | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: what sorts of things would a person do with this?

Not throwing rocks, this is a question based in my own ignorance. I know what Node is, but I don't use it and I'm not an Android dev. Thanks!

View on HN

What I’d do is running a full blown database application on the device. Couchbase Lite can do that as an example - replicate to a Couchbase server and allow offline access to data and indices. If your server part is Node.js based you should be able to have the whole thing running offline on devices.

Why? I’m Swiss. We drive a lot of trains and they enter a lot of tunnels. Or on the plane. Or on a mountain. Imagine you can just keep on editing all your business data and sync the delta once you get a connection.

In the past I've used PouchDB inside a webview for this use-case.

You may be interested in a new way to develop web applications that I have been developing. An entire site is represented in JSON, and pages are built by Javascript in the browser. This greatly reduces server calls, making it much faster as well as largely working offline.

The site is in late alpha: https://www.sparational.com/

(If you goto the Login screen and enter an unused username and password, it will create an account for you.)

On my phone, it just says application error

Which browser? I've tested on desktop Chrome, mobile Chrome, and mobile Firefox.

IE and Edge aren't currently supported, and might never be.

I tried Firefox Focus, Firefox Mobile, and Chrome. Just tested again and it's working now though. Looks interesting!

What makes this a better approach than having something like React run in a ServiceWorker?

www.sparational.com seems to have gone down since I started writing this comment, but when I clicked on the link, it seemed to have quite a considerable wait until anything appeared on the screen.

This is pretty much what Firebase is. https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/

I don't know about others, but developing react native apps I sometimes have the necessity to use some NPM modules that can't be used directly into react native. For example, I'm developing a 1-person chatbot platform and I want to run botkit processes inside the app so I don't need a backend. It can't be done with React Native but could be done using node-android or nodejs-mobile.

I was working on making a reddit auto repost detector bot based on opencv that I was going to leave running on an old phone.

I got node running on it without this though, but funemployment ended before getting the proper drivers running on it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com