Why WarpDrive?
WarpDrive is the data framework for building ambitious applications.
What do we mean by ambitious? WarpDrive is ideal for applications looking to be best-in-class: whether that's a small todo app, e-commerce, a social app, or an enterprise b2b software solution.
That's because WarpDrive is designed to seamlessly handle the hardest parts of state management when building an app, helping you focus on creating the features and user experiences that drive value.
At its most basic, it is "managed fetch". At its most advanced it is a powerful local-first or offline-first solution that dedupes and reactively updates requests across tabs.
Our value goes beyond our feature set. WarpDrive embraces the platform, making it quick to pickup the basics. Our patterns are portable and scalable, meaning that as your app, team and data needs evolve we'll be right there with you.
Usage across various rendering frameworks will be similar. In fact, this is an explicit goal: WarpDrive enables developers to quickly port and re-use data patterns.
Because we are universal and also not tied to any API Format or backend architecture, there's no lock-in. The data patterns you learn and the code you write is portable between frontend frameworks and backend APIs and can help smooth the evolution of both.
We're also not specific to a given frontend architecture. When serving on the same domain, you can dedupe and cache requests across multiple apps and tabs at once! This means we are as good for embedded content and MPAs as we are for SPAs.
A single WarpDrive configuration can power multiple web-apps using differing frameworks all sharing a single domain: bridging the gap between MPA and SPA.
We see this as one of the keys to scalability. Providing a stable framework for how data is requested, cached, mutated, and mocked allows developers to focus more time on the product requirements that matter.
Our core philosophy is to deliver value that lasts decades and evolves with your app, helping you ship, iterate and deliver to your customers.
A Very Brief History
WarpDrive began in ~2006 as a suite of ORM-like data utilities in SproutCore that later evolved into EmberData. Beginning in ~2017 the team plotted a course towards a significant evolution of the library based on the lessons learned in the first eleven years.
In ~2023 we lifted the veil on that work, shifting from a resource-centric library to a request-centric library and began accelerating towards our goal of becoming a universal library prepared for the demands of web applications over the coming decades.