Since the beginning of Rocicorp, our weekly team meeting has been called "Sync()". It's a silly joke, but also not. We're a fully distributed team — from Hawaii to Paris — so we are literally a distributed system that has to sync periodically to work effectively.

In a similar way all of you — our users, customers, and supporters — are part of this system. And with Reflect and Replicache changing rapidly, it can be easy for your information to fall out of date.

So we're starting a periodic newsletter to roll up the latest news from Rocicorp into a single update. We'll post it to this blog, but you can also receive it by email if you prefer:

With that intro out of the way, here's the latest...

Reflect

Reflect is now publicly available 🎉

Reflect is a fully-managed backend for Replicache, designed specifically for high-performance collaborative applications like Figma or Notion. It features 120FPS sync, first-class text support, and more — all backed by our unique server authority protocol. You can learn more at reflect.net or tap the button below to get started with your project.

Since launch, we’ve been busy adding numerous features including:

• First-class presence
• First-class text support via Yjs (Test it live here)
• Github integration
• Room-overflow, for creating experiences like games with max number of users
• REST API with support for creating, closing, and deleting rooms, as well as invalidating connections to rooms.
• Usage monitoring via npx reflect usage

For the latest information on changes to Reflect, you can always check out our release notes →

Replicache

We continue to improve Replicache, our client-side sync framework that works with most backend stacks.

Over the past ~six months, we've added:

• First-class offline support, with the ability to start and work in multiple tabs while offline.
• Completely overhauled documentation, including a rewritten BYOBackend tutorial, detailed Backend Strategies section, and three new Todo samples showing different ways to use Replicache.
• A long list of quality-of-life API improvements, including: re-enabling `undefined` support, strongly typed `get` and `scan` methods, reworked `pusher` and `puller` interfaces, ability to force an immediate push/pull, and much more.

If you missed out on any of this, now would be a great time to check it out! As always, you can read through the full release notes →

Local-First Podcast

Our very own Aaron Boodman recently did an episode of the Local-First Podcast, where he talks about his work on Google Gears, and his perspective on where we're at now and why local-first is finally happening.

Feedback? Questions?

We are a small team, and we read every message that is sent to us. Each piece of feedback gets us closer to crafting tools that work the way you need them to. The fastest way to connect with us is on Discord, where we will respond quickly and help you through any technical difficulties you may be having. We’re also happy to chat about your project ideas and how best to integrate Reflect or Replicache!

If email is more your style, drop us a line at hi@roci.dev.