Welcome to Zero Alpha

Zero is a new kind of sync engine powered by queries.

Rather than syncing entire tables to the client, or using static rules to carefully specify what to sync, you just write queries directly in your client code. Queries can access the entire backend database.

Zero caches the data for queries locally on the device, and reuses that data automatically to answer future queries whenever possible.

For typical applications, the result is that almost all queries are answered locally, instantly. It feels like you have access to the entire backend database directly from the client in memory. Occasionally, when you do a more specific query, Zero falls back to the server. But this happens automatically without any extra work required.

Zero is made possible by a custom streaming query engine we built called ZQL, which uses Incremental View Maintenance on both client and server to efficiently keep large, complex queries up to date.

Status

Zero is in alpha. There are still some rough edges, and to run it, you need to deploy it yourself to AWS or similar.

Even so, Zero is already quite fun to work with. We are using it ourselves to build our very own Linear-style bug tracker. We find that Zero is already much more productive than alternatives, even having to ocassionally work around a missing features.

If you are building a new web app that needs to be fast and reactive, and can do the deployment yourself, it's a great time to get started with Zero. We're working toward a beta release and full production readiness next year.