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Realm Mobile Platform – Realtime Sync Plus Fully Open Source Database

realm.io

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Re: Realm Mobile Platform – Realtime Sync Plus Fully Open Source Database

#11

Post by chatmasta »

nbevans wrote: post #2

These guys seem to be copying the Parse business model. Which as we all know worked out very nicely for the founders and investors. But very badly for anyone that adopted the Parse framework.

I disagree that Parse worked out badly. Now that parse-server is open source, the ecosystem is stronger than ever.

I hesitatingly and begrudgingly used parse while it was still hosted by Facebook. At the time my biggest and only problem with it was the vendor lock-in. Now that it's open source, that problem no longer exists, and all the great tooling is still around.

I'm happily using it on new projects. I suggest taking a look and trying it yourself.

Re: Realm Mobile Platform – Realtime Sync Plus Fully Open Source Database

#12

Post by avtar »

timanglade wrote: post #7
aeharding wrote: post #6

Or, you know, support an open source alternative like PouchDB/CouchDB. Sync, conflict resolution, offline-first, and data push are all supported. Not to mention it's a very stable, mature ecosystem. There are even enterprise-ready setups using CouchDB (like Cloudant) for those that want it.

Hi, former Apache CouchDB guy, former Cloudant employee, and former Realm employee here… I (still) love CouchDB but at the end of the day I think its sync is a better fit for server-to-server or web client-to-server use-cases, not mobile-to-server. There’s tons of stuff CouchDB sync doesn’t support that end up being a huge problem with mobile apps… Here are the top 3 things Realm adds in my opinion: great client-side…

There’s tons of stuff CouchDB sync doesn’t support that end up being a huge problem with mobile apps… Here are the top 3 things Realm adds in my opinion: great client-side performance, native models that are extremely easy to use, and conflict-free sync (not conflict resolution!).

Thanks for listing those potential benefits. Any idea if those CouchDB issues are covered in detail somewhere?

Re: Realm Mobile Platform – Realtime Sync Plus Fully Open Source Database

#14

Post by ramses0 »

timanglade wrote: post #7
aeharding wrote: post #6

Or, you know, support an open source alternative like PouchDB/CouchDB. Sync, conflict resolution, offline-first, and data push are all supported. Not to mention it's a very stable, mature ecosystem. There are even enterprise-ready setups using CouchDB (like Cloudant) for those that want it.

Hi, former Apache CouchDB guy, former Cloudant employee, and former Realm employee here… I (still) love CouchDB but at the end of the day I think its sync is a better fit for server-to-server or web client-to-server use-cases, not mobile-to-server. There’s tons of stuff CouchDB sync doesn’t support that end up being a huge problem with mobile apps… Here are the top 3 things Realm adds in my opinion: great client-side…

Can you explain this statement: "There’s tons of stuff CouchDB sync doesn’t support that end up being a huge problem with mobile apps"

You lay it out there and then talk about what Realm adds, but never what Couch lacks. And are you including PouchDB in your evaluation of CouchDB for "Client-Side Performance"?

As I understand PouchDB is performant, uses JSON (pretty much the definition of "Native Models"), and allows server-arbitrated conflict resolution with stored revisions, making the simplest conflict resolution "last-in-wins" with user UI for "undo" (or any JS-object merge library).

Thanks!

Re: Realm Mobile Platform – Realtime Sync Plus Fully Open Source Database

#15

Post by timanglade »

Former Realm employee here.

So glad to see the team finally launch this. I've seen them work their asses for years (literally!) to launch something I know Realm’s 100k+ dev community was clamoring for from day one but was really hard to build.

I'm biased of course but honestly I think they have soft-key shipped one of the most transformational mobile technologies ever: real-time, conflict-free sync that works as well offline as online. There was a lot of literature on this of course but bringing it all together in one product was something else!

From engineering to marketing, product & founders I know they've sweated to get here and I'm just so, so happy for them.

I know they will make a lot of developers and customers happy, and for that I say: bravo.

Re: Realm Mobile Platform – Realtime Sync Plus Fully Open Source Database

#17

Post by daleharvey »

avtar wrote: post #12
timanglade wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, former Apache CouchDB guy, former Cloudant employee, and former Realm employee here… I (still) love CouchDB but at the end of the day I think its sync is a better fit for server-to-server or web client-to-server use-cases, not mobile-to-server. There’s tons of stuff CouchDB sync doesn’t support that end up being a huge problem with mobile apps… Here are the top 3 things Realm adds in my opinion: great client-side…

There’s tons of stuff CouchDB sync doesn’t support that end up being a huge problem with mobile apps… Here are the top 3 things Realm adds in my opinion: great client-side performance, native models that are extremely easy to use, and conflict-free sync (not conflict resolution!). Thanks for listing those potential benefits. Any idea if those CouchDB issues are covered in detail somewhere?

I work on PouchDB, in terms of those points:

"great client-side performance": PouchDB is more than fast enough for most use cases, its just a wrapper over indexedDB. (there are areas we can improve, particularly performance of map reduce / mango queries).

"native models that are extremely easy to use": Not sure what that means, PouchDB and CouchDB use json, its native and easy to use in JavaScript

"conflict-free sync (not conflict resolution!)": Certainly going to have to take a look at this, any conflict free sync protocol I have seen put a lot of limitations on how data within your application is structured but conflict resolution certainly is something that can be improved within Pouch / Couch.

I do think there is a bunch we can (and are) improving in PouchDB and its great to see alternatives, will be looking into this further now. But I certainly do not agree that (C|P)ouchDB are not suited for mobile web sync, thats the primary use case I work on Pouch for.

Re: Realm Mobile Platform – Realtime Sync Plus Fully Open Source Database

#18

Post by TimOliver »

rikkimaru wrote: post #8

Switched from CoreData to Realm for a database-heavy communications iOS app. Been using it for about 6 months, so not an expert, but I've done some interesting stuff with it :) Main benefits I saw: * faster performance * simpler multi-threading * built-in encryption based on ios' commoncrypto (fips 140-2 module) * fast response time to questions on github (in 3 cases) Main drawbacks: * no icloud syncing. I need to ch…

Hi! Tim from Realm here. Glad to hear that Realm's been working out well for you in place of Core Data. :)

In response to your drawbacks there: * Definitely try out the Realm Mobile Platform. We're also looking at leveraging CloudKit to seamlessly authenticate all devices belonging to a user. * Multi-process encryption wasn't possible until relatively recently (Issue #1845 on our newly open-sourced realm-core project!), so we'll definitely be looking at it from now. Please do thumbs-up any of our GitHub issues for features that you would like. * We've published articles on how the Realm Core works in the past, but now that it's open-source, you can go and see the code for yourself! * It's possible to generate compacted copies of Realm files, so you can implement this functionality yourself if you need it. We've had long discussions about whether this should be an automatic feature, but we feel in most cases it would be premature optimization.

Re: Realm Mobile Platform – Realtime Sync Plus Fully Open Source Database

#19

Post by relics443 »

daleharvey wrote: post #17
avtar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s tons of stuff CouchDB sync doesn’t support that end up being a huge problem with mobile apps… Here are the top 3 things Realm adds in my opinion: great client-side performance, native models that are extremely easy to use, and conflict-free sync (not conflict resolution!). Thanks for listing those potential benefits. Any idea if those CouchDB issues are covered in detail somewhere?

I work on PouchDB, in terms of those points: "great client-side performance": PouchDB is more than fast enough for most use cases, its just a wrapper over indexedDB. (there are areas we can improve, particularly performance of map reduce / mango queries). "native models that are extremely easy to use": Not sure what that means, PouchDB and CouchDB use json, its native and easy to use in JavaScript "conflict-free sync…

"native models that are extremely easy to use"

This means native code (specifically not JSON). So in Java you would be dealing with POJOs, etc...

Re: Realm Mobile Platform – Realtime Sync Plus Fully Open Source Database

#20

Post by WA »

daleharvey wrote: post #17
avtar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s tons of stuff CouchDB sync doesn’t support that end up being a huge problem with mobile apps… Here are the top 3 things Realm adds in my opinion: great client-side performance, native models that are extremely easy to use, and conflict-free sync (not conflict resolution!). Thanks for listing those potential benefits. Any idea if those CouchDB issues are covered in detail somewhere?

I work on PouchDB, in terms of those points: "great client-side performance": PouchDB is more than fast enough for most use cases, its just a wrapper over indexedDB. (there are areas we can improve, particularly performance of map reduce / mango queries). "native models that are extremely easy to use": Not sure what that means, PouchDB and CouchDB use json, its native and easy to use in JavaScript "conflict-free sync…

A bit OT, but I have to compliment the person who wrote the docs[1] for PouchDB. They're quite entertaining and easy to understand. Well done!

[1]: https://pouchdb.com/guides/

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