Show HN: Realm (YC S11), a mobile database • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Realm (YC S11), a mobile database

#31

Post by jc4p » Tue, Jul 15, 2014, 7:23 PM UTC

Cool idea. I had the same problem with the intro video that others have mentioned. I'm gonna read more when the Android version is out, since this might actually be able to fix a common pain point I have with my apps with data persistence (I'd like to be able to read recently touched questions in my Stack Exchange app even when I don't have internet, which requires a damn complex caching layer).

Just a side note: The SO link you have in the footer seems to not have any questions about your actual product in the tag, but about Java realms instead.

Re: Show HN: Realm (YC S11), a mobile database

#32

Post by timanglade » Tue, Jul 15, 2014, 7:38 PM UTC

jc4p wrote: post #31

Cool idea. I had the same problem with the intro video that others have mentioned. I'm gonna read more when the Android version is out, since this might actually be able to fix a common pain point I have with my apps with data persistence (I'd like to be able to read recently touched questions in my Stack Exchange app even when I don't have internet, which requires a damn complex caching layer). Just a side note: The…

Yup, offline mode is definitely a big area of focus for us. Regarding the tag, I’m not sure what the protocol is for these things, but since it wasn’t used for a clear product/project/topic, we figured it was as good a destination as any, since we’d prefer to let everybody benefit from answers we may give to support questions, via SO.

I’m drafting something to dive deeper into the video now; anything in particular you’d like us to dive into?

Re: Show HN: Realm (YC S11), a mobile database

#33

Post by bravura » Tue, Jul 15, 2014, 7:45 PM UTC

If you could make this automatically sync to a backend database, that would be amazing. It would be great to have the hard bits solved for us.

Re: Show HN: Realm (YC S11), a mobile database

#34

Post by jc4p » Tue, Jul 15, 2014, 7:45 PM UTC

timanglade wrote: post #32

jc4p wrote: post #31

Cool idea. I had the same problem with the intro video that others have mentioned. I'm gonna read more when the Android version is out, since this might actually be able to fix a common pain point I have with my apps with data persistence (I'd like to be able to read recently touched questions in my Stack Exchange app even when I don't have internet, which requires a damn complex caching layer). Just a side note: The…

Yup, offline mode is definitely a big area of focus for us. Regarding the tag, I’m not sure what the protocol is for these things, but since it wasn’t used for a clear product/project/topic, we figured it was as good a destination as any, since we’d prefer to let everybody benefit from answers we may give to support questions, via SO. I’m drafting something to dive deeper into the video now; anything in particular yo…

I'd love deeper info about "we don’t require deserialization to get objects out of the file", but that might be somewhere in the documentation. I'm assuming you're faster than SQLite, so a demo showing those side by side might be a good selling point too.

Re: Show HN: Realm (YC S11), a mobile database

#35

Post by kakugawa » Tue, Jul 15, 2014, 7:47 PM UTC

magsafe wrote: post #24

timanglade wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big thing is really ease of use. Our blog post has a few more details on that point [0] but basically what we heard over and over and saw ourselves, is that Core Data quickly gets in your way if your app grows [1][2][3]. In essence, we tried with this initial release to offer a rich feature set with a simple API, less side-effects (especially for multi-threaded apps), and a performance that’s even better than usi…

Core Data has been improved and stabilized by Apple for over a decade, is used internally by many first party apps in iOS, is well documented and fully integrated into Xcode, and heavily "marketed" by Apple at WWDC. Any perceived performance issues can be eliminated or reduced by using faults, indexes and improving queries through NSPredicates. Even one of the blog posts you quote above [3] states that if he was star…

CoreData is not as stable as advertised. If you use it simply it works. However advanced use will quickly discover sharp edges. I devote a non-trivial amount of code managing objects between contexts and there are still FRC bugs. (e.g. sorted update.)

And it's all closed source.

Re: Show HN: Realm (YC S11), a mobile database

#36

Post by rjsamson » Tue, Jul 15, 2014, 7:48 PM UTC

Wow - this looks really great! As someone who has struggled with Core Data in the past, the API looks great and things seem, on the whole, a lot cleaner. Looking forward to giving it a go.

EDIT: I just came across the REST API / JSON import section in the documentation - really cool stuff!!

Re: Show HN: Realm (YC S11), a mobile database

#37

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 15, 2014, 7:48 PM UTC

timanglade wrote: post #23

melvinmt wrote: post #21

Looks interesting! The Swift examples on the homepage seem to be showing Obj-C code: http://cl.ly/image/2r250h3a0A1y

Sorry about that. We’ve been seeing some issues with our CloudFront caches all morning, but if you give it a hard reload or two in your browser, you should eventually see our Swift samples — we’ll keep working to fix the issue.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Realm (YC S11), a mobile database

#38

Post by chrishough » Tue, Jul 15, 2014, 7:52 PM UTC

looks cool, can't wait to try this out!

Re: Show HN: Realm (YC S11), a mobile database

#39

Post by tillk » Tue, Jul 15, 2014, 7:56 PM UTC

astigsen wrote: post #22

tillk wrote: post #15

How do you backup this database? Does it integrate with iCloud or whatever is available on the device?

The database is stored in a single file that is easily backed up. It does not have any explicit integration with iCloud, but you can easily use it to back up a copy of the db, or you can stream the copy back home yourself via ftp or http.

I'm somewhat of a newbie in regards to developing on mobile devices. Got any documentation how this is done from the phone?

Re: Show HN: Realm (YC S11), a mobile database

#40

Post by astigsen » Tue, Jul 15, 2014, 8:00 PM UTC

jc4p wrote: post #34

timanglade wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, offline mode is definitely a big area of focus for us. Regarding the tag, I’m not sure what the protocol is for these things, but since it wasn’t used for a clear product/project/topic, we figured it was as good a destination as any, since we’d prefer to let everybody benefit from answers we may give to support questions, via SO. I’m drafting something to dive deeper into the video now; anything in particular yo…

I'd love deeper info about "we don’t require deserialization to get objects out of the file", but that might be somewhere in the documentation. I'm assuming you're faster than SQLite, so a demo showing those side by side might be a good selling point too.

Realm is not an ORM, but rather an integral part of your language. One key difference is that it does not have to copy all values in the objects back and fourth as you read them and save them, as most ORM's does. So that gives a huge performance improvement.

There are some benchmarks in our intro blogpost[0]. So I can recommend reading that for a bit more background information. We will have more blog posts coming out soon about the technical details.

[0] http://realm.io/news/introducing-realm/