What if the Database Was Just an Object?

We were on a high. The new sync engine, our "instruction" protocol, felt like a massive leap forward. It was lean, fast, and elegant. For the first time, this project felt less like a curious experiment and more like a viable path to a new way of building things. With the client-server connection feeling solid, we turned our attention to the next glaring hole in our system: persistence.

An application that forgets everything when you restart it isn't an application. It's a toy.

The obvious solution was to bolt on a database. We're developers; we've all done this a hundred times. We picked a familiar, battle-tested database, added the driver to our project, and started writing the code to connect our in-memory JavaScript object to it.

The friction was immediate and painful. It felt like hitting a wall of mud.

Suddenly, we were back in the world of boilerplate. Connection strings, query builders, ORMs. We had to write code to serialize our beautiful, living JavaScript object into rows and columns, flattening it to fit a rigid schema. Then we had to write more code to deserialize it back into an object on startup. Every change to our server's state now required a corresponding UPDATE query.

The seamless flow was gone. We had just spent weeks eliminating the gap between the server and the client, only to introduce a new, jarring chasm between our application logic and our data. The "impedance mismatch" was glaring. Our code thought in terms of objects and properties, but the database demanded tables and queries. The two worlds didn't want to speak the same language.

After a few days of this, the frustration was palpable. During one call, looking at a screen full of awkward data mapping code, the architect made a proposal that sounded, at first, completely insane.

"We're fighting this so hard. What if we just stopped? What if the database... was just a JavaScript object?"

The idea was radical. "You mean build our own database? That's a classic trap." The pragmatist in our group was immediately skeptical, and for good reason. Building a database is a notoriously difficult problem.

But the idea was also incredibly seductive. "What if it just _felt_ like a plain object to the developer," the architect continued, "but it transparently wrote its changes to the filesystem? No queries, no serialization, no mismatch. You just write state.user.name = 'new name', and it's saved. Transactionally."

The possibility was tantalizing. To maintain the perfect, zero-friction workflow from the application logic all the way down to the disk—it was the logical conclusion of our entire philosophy. It was a huge risk, but the alternative was to accept a layer of complexity that felt fundamentally opposed to the very problem we were trying to solve.

So we're doing it. We're going to try and build a simple, file-backed, in-memory database that feels like nothing more than a variable. It might be a terrible mistake, but it's a mistake in the right direction.