Browsers are becoming the operating systems of the web with Javascript as the underlying virtual machine. Rich internet applications with lots of interactive features are omnipresent. Web applications have the advantage of being available everywhere and on any platform. Often seamlessly sharing your application data between different devices. However, realizing such advanced features in a traditional three-tier architecture requires developers to select and master a myriad of technologies because each tier comes with its own technology stack.

Tierless programming languages aim to reduce this complexity. They enable developing a web application as a single mono-linguistic application, which renders its development alike to that of a desktop application. A preprocessor or the runtime of these languages realizes a split into a client, server and sometimes a database tier, where communication between the different tiers is handled transparently.

One downside of traditional rich internet applications is that they require a stable internet connection which means they do not provide the same user experience as native operating system applications. When the user's connection slows down or is lost some features of the application might also slow down or become unresponsive.

An existing technique to enable a true offline experience is by replicating application state from the server to the different clients. However, existing techniques often replicate the entire application state to every client which can be unfeasible for various reasons. First, this is a problem for applications with a large data set. For example, increasing the offline user experience for a website such as Wikipedia would require enabling offline availability for only certain articles and not the entire database. Second, if the dataset includes user-specific data then replicating the entire dataset to all clients might cause security leaks.