Video streaming service Netflix has open sourced one of its internally developed JavaScript libraries that could be very useful for mobile development. Called Falcor (after the luckdragon in The Neverending Story), the tool can fetch remote data and keep it ready for use by a client device. “Developers strive to create the illusion that all of their application’s data is sitting right there on the user’s device just waiting to be displayed,” Netflix explained in a blog post. “To make that experience a reality, data must be efficiently retrieved from the network and intelligently cached on the client.”
Falcor can make a wide variety of data appear as if it were a single JSON object. Netflix added, “Falcor keeps your data in a single, coherent cache and manages stale data and cache pruning for you. Falcor automatically traverses references in your graph and makes requests as needed. It transparently handles all network communications, opportunistically batching and de-duping requests.”
The Falcor code is available through the Netflix website and GitHub.