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Comment by taybin | Hacker News Reader

I think promising "we want to enable you to build complete web apps in days" might be promising too much. Programming is difficult, there is no silver bullet, and a different data store certainly won't change that.

Interesting choice of couchdb. Any reasons for that compared to the alternatives?

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If I had to guess, the fact that HTTP and JSON are CouchDB's native tongue (removing the need for a middleman in front of the DB) was likely a factor.

That, and that CouchDB has Sync already figured out. Hoodie didn’t have to invent this. Sync is hard, leave it to the experts.

If you want to have a local DB in the browser, and a remote DB in the cloud, your choices are basically CouchDB or a ton of pain reinventing the wheel. Replication and syncing are hard.

In other words, for the very specific problem they're trying to solve, I don't think there ARE a lot of alternatives except "abandon local storage, and work directly against a DB in the cloud".

tay, I'm one of the developers behind hoodie.

I agree that there is no silver bullet for apps, and Hoodie does not try to be one. Our main goal is to enable as many people as possible to build real, data driven apps.

Think of it this way: if you're able today to build the frontend of an app in days, then you've all it takes. Our maxim is: if you get jQuery, you should be able to build apps with user accounts, data synchronization, emails ... the basic, boring stuff.

hoodie strikes me as more of a local optimum rather than a global one. In other words, it's not a universal silver bullet and wouldn't be suitable for all tasks. But for the tasks for which it is suited, perhaps it can eliminate a lot of boilerplate.

[Disclaimer: I've spent a total of 5-10 minutes reading about hoodie.]

Anyone trying for a global maximum will fail :)

We designed Hoodie with very few, but very specific use cases, to get the core right. The more use cases we’ll add, the broader it will get, but we have no intention of pleasing everyone.

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