A few months ago I built a really simple web app to add tasks in bulk to Remember The Milk. It was straightforward to make and pretty easy to use, but there was one little niggle with it.
I’d decided to use HTML5 local storage to save the lists of tasks as key/value pairs. This was great as it allowed me to avoid building a server-side system to store this data. However, it also meant that the lists were only available on the device they were originally entered on. This was a pain, as what I really wanted was to be able to compile the lists on a computer, but then to be able to use them on my phone.
What I needed was a way to synchronise the data between all my different devices, but without having to run a server-side system just for this very simple app. The right solution may well have been out there, but I couldn’t find it, so I decided to build my own.
And that’s what Quolace is, it’s a key/value store for simple, single-page, web apps. You simply add the JavaScript library to your page, hook up all the get and set commands, and your users will be able to use their data and settings on whatever computer they want.
I’ll probably be using it from now on for all the little things I throw together in an afternoon, and I’d love other people to make use of it too. If you’d like to give it a go then there’s documentation and a demo app available to help you get your head round it. Do let me know if you find any problems, it’s all still quite new so there might be a bug or two lurking in there.
