Re: I'm not a programmer.
I imagine that Fronter's server is probably REST based and it's not beyond the wit of man to provide the same API on a daemon running on the client PC answering localhost connections. Stored procedures are moved into the daemon itself, the SQLite engine provides SQL services and nobody, not even Frontier at the moment, is running a backend with 400 billion star systems and 375 TB of data.
Remember they thought they could do offline mode until they decided to make it online only and more fancy. Nobody is going to explore the entire galaxy, just a small part of it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
