Database synchronization in a Ruby world

[Mike]

I saw Tom Gullo's comment on the Google Code blog today regarding
database synchronization. He pointed to an open-source project called
SymmetricDB (http://symmetricds.sourceforge.net/). I'm not too
familiar with it aside from the fact that it's written in Java, so I
wanted to open this issue up to some discussion.

Our approach from the start has always been to minimize dependencies
on external software as much as possible, at least as far as our
plugin code is concerned. This means doing everything with Ruby or
JavaScript, depending on whether you are in the server or client
context.

That said, database synchronization is a key issue if you are going to
take web applications offline in a seamless fashion. We attempted to
solve this problem by creating a "REST queue" that enabled us to
replay offline actions on the server side when the app comes back
online.

I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this topic, as well as any
suggestions you may have for other approaches to database
synchronization that we haven't considered. Talk amongst yourselves.