Honestly I didn't know that this is a feature people want (no criticism intended). So, you have a database object in your browser and that takes care of getting the data to the server himself? Otherwise every website syncs data between its browser instances and its database, right? That's how we get state.
The sync happens in an unmanaged fashion, without the user or the application programmer having to care about the state of the connection.
Your PouchDB application works locally on your device, whether the connection is up and down, and the data is synched with the remote database whenever there is connection.
The alternatives to this PouchDB to CouchDB synching mechanism would have to be either:
- the user checks whether the connection is up, and manually manages the sync, or
- the application programmer saves the user the trouble by adding code that checks whether the connection is up, and automatically manages the sync
Using a synced data model provides a few features for users, data access is efficient and far far faster (disk/memory is faster than network) and it allows offline usage (+ failure tolerance, the server goes down the client still works). It can also enable p2p use cases and a bunch of other things, the above 2 are the main drivers though
