You can do offline first by installing CouchDB on the client side and using that to store user data. This only works on a desktop PC right now but for some apps

You can do offline first by installing CouchDB on the client side and using that to store user data. This only works on a desktop PC right now but for some apps that's a much better approach. My own testing had my web browsers choking up when I had a few thousand documents stored in the browser's IndexedDB. This is on a 10 year old Mac Mini with 8gb ram. Could be that newer PCs do better but I doubt they'll do much better. Using CouchDB with PouchDB.js provides a "Live Sync" option that syncs data both ways and that feature works very well with the apps I've made which do not have 1000s of users accessing the same DB. In my case there are probably not more than a dozen users accessing the same DB. And in my case there is not much chance more than one user is modifying a document at any given time. Also, in my case, there is no "backend logic" being processed. That's all done in the user's web browser.