Optimistic Server Interactions

I wrote a bit about this over at daily.js.

At PicPlz we built a hybrid mobile app. We had a native container written for iOS and Android that hosted a web version of our code. PicPlz was the first time I had worked on a fully mobile website. My operating paradigm was that I was building a website for a small screen.

One day, our iOS developer asked me why our follow button didn’t just react when a user touched it. He pointed out that most iOS apps work that way. It was a glaring reminder that our app was something other than native. I genuinely had never thought about doing it any other way. I was building a web app, and when building web apps there is network IO. For things to be consistent, you need to wait until the network IO has finished. The other engineer persisted though, claiming that it doesn’t have to work that way.

“Optimistic Server Interactions” via DailyJS

I really want to see how far we can take these.