A technician walking through the fields

Grids of the solar panels

Goals

Business Cases

• Commuters taking public transit
• Travellers with intermittent connectivity
• Technicians that work in remote locations

Technical Goals

• "Stop treating a lack of connectivity like an error"
• View all the content, all the time!
• Drupal to React, without middleware

Tools

Drupal 8.1.x

• "Fast by default"
• Some required modules do not exist for D7
  • RELAXed, Deploy, Multiversion, Workspace, Replication, CORS
• Thank you to the maintainers!
  • jeqq, timmillwood, dixon_, et al.

React

• Designed for “building large applications with data that changes over time”
• Composable, Declarative, Components
• Proven to work well with Drupal 8

Sunsail.co.uk

pouchDB/couchDB

• Offline-first ≃ mobile-first
• All content is available, all the time!
• Content conflicts are elegantly handled
• Very dev friendly, very browser friendly 😊

pouchDB Setup

var localDB  = new PouchDB('pouchDBInstance');
var remoteDB = new PouchDB('http://couch-db-instance.com/endpoint');

localDB.sync(remoteDB).on('complete', function () {
  // sync success :)
}).on('error', function (err) {
  // 'sync error :(
});
		          

Build Process & Demo

Build Drupal & Friends

$ composer require drupal/relaxed drupal/cors drupal/deploy

$ composer require drupal/multiversion:8.1.x-dev

Configure Relaxed

Create React App

Security

How secure is RELAXed & PouchDB?

• "Data that can be accessible to unauthenticated users makes an ideal candidate for offline storage."
• "No role, ACL or ownership checks in CouchDB."
• "Filtered replication: from Couch to Pouch and back."

Afterthoughts

Is RELAXed+PouchDB enterprise ready?

• Lack of strong permission control suggests, no.
• Suitable for publicly available content, without write permissions.

IBM Cloudant Envoy

Is RELAXed+PouchDB preferable over any other option?

• Tie: Document store in the browser that is available offline.
• Lose: PouchDB doesn't have per-document controls.
• Win: PouchDB handles all of the syncing for you.

Looking Forward

• Let the CMS do what it does best
• Build native with CouchDB for Android and iOS
• Unleash your front-end devs!