Store in a Box
A Couchbase demo. A retail store packs part of itself into a box (Couchbase Edge Server plus a few tablets
running Couchbase Lite), sells at a venue with no connectivity, splits into smaller pieces that each keep
selling, merges them back in any order, and rejoins the chain through Capella App Services with every unit
and every dollar accounted for. Agents in Capella plan the trip and prove their claims; a small model on the
box helps the clerk.
The product is the demo. The platform is the product.
The beats
- Place: agents score venues and check permits, with the passage behind every claim.
- Pack: scan units out of the store onto the box. Custody, not counts.
- Sell: pull the cable. Two tablets, device-to-device sync, hybrid-search upsell, offline loyalty.
- Split: a tablet walks off with eight jackets and is still a store. Then a phone splits off the tablet.
- Merge: in any order, tablet to tablet, no cloud. Plug in: kilobytes, and the conservation query holds.
- Rejoin: forks become exceptions with both sides attached, an explainer, a retrospective that feeds the next trip.
The pattern underneath: a conflict-free ledger
Custody never conflicts, by construction. Every movement of a unit (pack, take, return, sale) is an immutable
document written once by one device and naming the movement before it; counts are derived, never edited. Two sales
of the last unit are a fork in that unit's history, found by the same rules on every tablet and at HQ, and the fork
becomes an exception with both sales attached. No resolver, no node choosing between two versions of a document:
docs/architecture/conflict-free-ledger.md.
Layout
docs/ spec and architecture notes · site/ product page · deck/ customer deck (to come) ·
scripts/build-site.mjs assembles site/, deck/ and docs/images/ into _site/.
Building the demo
Build in the phases the spec lays out, in order, and demo after each one. Phase 0 is sync and custody with no
AI at all: a pack plan entered by scanning, two tablets selling with the uplink cut, a one-level split and
merge, a staged oversell that becomes an exception, and the conservation query holding throughout. The cut line
for a first showing is the end of Phase 1.
Open questions that should be settled before Phase 0 are listed at the end of the spec.
Couchbase Lite edition
The tablet app (app/) builds against Couchbase Lite Community Edition by default. Device-to-device sync (the
Multipeer Replicator) needs Enterprise Edition, which is used only when whoever builds the app opts in with
SIAB_CBL_EDITION=enterprise (see app/README.md); without it the app still sells and syncs with
the box, and its Diagnostics screen shows the mesh as unavailable. Checking that your use of Couchbase Lite
Enterprise Edition is covered by its licence is your responsibility.
