Ask HN: How Can I Make My Front End React to Database Changes in Real-Time?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

SurveyJS: Build JSON-Driven Surveys and Forms with Full Data Control
Add the SurveyJS UI components to your JS app (React/Angular/Vue3). Securely collect and analyze data without sending it to 3rd-party servers. Fully customizable, works with any backend, and ideal for data-heavy apps. Learn more.
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Stream - Scalable APIs for Chat, Feeds, Moderation, & Video.
Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
getstream.io
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  1. Hasura

    Blazing fast, instant realtime GraphQL APIs on all your data with fine grained access control, also trigger webhooks on database events.

    [4] https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine/blob/master/architecture/live-queries.md

  2. SurveyJS

    SurveyJS: Build JSON-Driven Surveys and Forms with Full Data Control. Add the SurveyJS UI components to your JS app (React/Angular/Vue3). Securely collect and analyze data without sending it to 3rd-party servers. Fully customizable, works with any backend, and ideal for data-heavy apps. Learn more.

    SurveyJS logo
  3. readyset

    Readyset is a MySQL and Postgres wire-compatible caching layer that sits in front of existing databases to speed up queries and horizontally scale read throughput. Under the hood, ReadySet caches the results of cached select statements and incrementally updates these results over time as the underlying data changes.

    - Some platforms like Supabase Realtime [3] and Firebase offer subscription models to database changes, but these solutions fall short when dealing with complex queries involving joins or group-bys.

    My vision is that the modern frontend to behave like a series of materialized views that dynamically update as the underlying data changes. Current state management libraries handle state trees well but don't seamlessly integrate with relational or graph-like database structures.

    The only thing I can think of is to implement it by myself, which sounds like a big PITA.

    Anything goes, Brainstorm with me. Is it causing you headaches as well? Are you familiar with an efficient solution? how are you all tackling it?

    [1] https://readyset.io/

  4. materialize

    The live data layer for apps and AI agents Create up-to-the-second views into your business, just using SQL (by MaterializeInc)

    [2] https://materialize.com/

  5. RxDB

    A fast, local first, reactive Database for JavaScript Applications https://rxdb.info/

    I'm interested in this problem also!

    I think there is a large overlap with projects that market/focus on offline-first experiences.

    AFAIK this problem can be solved by:

    1) Considering a client-side copy of the database that gets synced with the remote DB. This is an approach [PowerSync](https://www.powersync.com/) and [ElectricSql](https://electric-sql.com/) and [rxdb](https://rxdb.info/) take!

  6. electric

    Real-time sync for Postgres.

    I'm interested in this problem also!

    I think there is a large overlap with projects that market/focus on offline-first experiences.

    AFAIK this problem can be solved by:

    1) Considering a client-side copy of the database that gets synced with the remote DB. This is an approach [PowerSync](https://www.powersync.com/) and [ElectricSql](https://electric-sql.com/) and [rxdb](https://rxdb.info/) take!

  7. materialite

    Differential Dataflow & Incremental View Maintenance for JavaScript

    Hey, Electric co-founder here.

    Yup, our reactivity is quite simple at the moment, as described, and works quite well because SQLite is so fast. There are other projects doing more sophisticated reactivity algorithms, like Riffle/LiveStore, which has a reactive DAG optimised to avoid re-rendering and https://github.com/vlcn-io/materialite, which is like differential dataflow for live queries.

    They're quite bleeding edge at the moment, but you can expect more efficient primitives for incremental view maintenance / efficient subscriptions to land in the embedded database layer quite soon.

    Just also re: above, shape filtering for partial sync landed in v0.10 https://electric-sql.com/blog/2024/04/10/electricsql-v0.10-r... :)

  8. RethinkDB

    The open-source database for the realtime web.

  9. Stream

    Stream - Scalable APIs for Chat, Feeds, Moderation, & Video. Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.

    Stream logo
  10. perspective

    A data visualization and analytics component, especially well-suited for large and/or streaming datasets.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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