What do u mean with Application?

The problem I see here is that they really wanna make Tabbles a shared experience. They don’t want sharing to be one of the features, they want any resource to be sharable, and sharing be normal in user’ experience.

The easiest and probably best way to do it is how they did, get a RDBMS running data and have a Tabbles WinApp running on each PC connecting to it. But it has the drawback of latency and the requirement of being always connected with the RDBMS. And also the resource needed to run the RDBMS of course.

It was a solid decision, it was implemented, and it has came to stay.

The problem with caching is how to sync data back to server, and how to merge inconsistences among clients. I mean, the advantage of a DBMS is that data is processed in transactional/atomic behavior. If 2 users try to write on the same data on the same time, the later has to wait the first finish. Writing on different areas can be done in parallel.

There are apps that support local caching, like Evernote. But then, again, there’s the trouble of implementing multiple data accesses, of implementing their synching and the merging of data, and users also most do manual merging.

For 1 user in 1 PC, I understand these drawbacks will never happen and we remain with the performance issues. But, at least for now, this is te best solution available for powerful and easy sharing support.