It says the database is open source but I can't find any link to the source code. Is both the client and server open source?
Realm Mobile Platform – Realtime Sync Plus Fully Open Source Database
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Re: Realm Mobile Platform – Realtime Sync Plus Fully Open Source Database
#42Former 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…
@timanglade, congrats to you and your former team! Always awesome to launch, good job.
Full disclosure, I work on a competing product (MIT licensed, https://github.com/amark/gun ) and do a lot of testing on distributed systems.
You guys say it is offline-first with conflict-resolution. However your documentation ( https://realm.io/docs/realm-object-server/#conflict-resoluti... ) states the "Last update wins". This is contradictory for two reasons:
A) Either you mean last write wins relative to the server. But an offline update is going to get sent late (on reconnect), which would make it "last" and lead to weird problems.
B) Or you mean last write wins relative to the time stamp of the client. But this does not account for wall clock drift. What happens if the client's clock is intentionally set 2 years in the future? In a distributed system, everybody has a different "last".
The demo video, while very well done, uses a drawing app which does not really demonstrate real conflict (ie, if 2 users draw over the same space, it becomes a z-index rendering issue, which could be solved with conflict resolution but isn't a good example of conflict).
Re: Realm Mobile Platform – Realtime Sync Plus Fully Open Source Database
#43It says the database is open source but I can't find any link to the source code. Is both the client and server open source?
The core database that powers all the versions of Realm was open-sourced today here:
https://github.com/realm/realm-core
The various SDKs that use the core for each mobile platform have always been open source, such as realm-cocoa:
Re: Realm Mobile Platform – Realtime Sync Plus Fully Open Source Database
#44Former 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…
@timanglade, congrats to you and your former team! Always awesome to launch, good job. Full disclosure, I work on a competing product (MIT licensed, https://github.com/amark/gun ) and do a lot of testing on distributed systems. You guys say it is offline-first with conflict-resolution. However your documentation ( https://realm.io/docs/realm-object-server/#conflict-resoluti... ) states the "Last update wins". This is…
See the full answer from Realm’s founder/CEO here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12590753
Re: Realm Mobile Platform – Realtime Sync Plus Fully Open Source Database
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
@timanglade, congrats to you and your former team! Always awesome to launch, good job. Full disclosure, I work on a competing product (MIT licensed, https://github.com/amark/gun ) and do a lot of testing on distributed systems. You guys say it is offline-first with conflict-resolution. However your documentation ( https://realm.io/docs/realm-object-server/#conflict-resoluti... ) states the "Last update wins". This is…
See the full answer from Realm’s founder/CEO here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12590753
Thanks, did not see that. Not all vector clocks provide conflict resolution though - actually, they can very much lack in this regard. For instance, you are much more likely to get two clients that increment to the same vector while offline than two clients getting the exact same millisecond timestamp.
Which would make the problem worse, not resolved. What type of vector are you using?
Re: Realm Mobile Platform – Realtime Sync Plus Fully Open Source Database
#46Congrats!
Realm and React Native is now my go-to, keep up the solid work :)
Re: Realm Mobile Platform – Realtime Sync Plus Fully Open Source Database
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think you're misunderstanding what "Native Models" means in the context of iOS work. Saying that a database uses JSON immediately, to many ios devs, recalls years of writing very fragile json serialization code. Looking through CouchDB's iOS example apps confirms that yes, basically everything that isn't a string or int has to be serialized into JSON. That's a pretty enormous annoyance, and incorporates a lot of ad…
CouchDB doesn't have any iOS code, are you perhaps referring to Couchbase?
Re: Realm Mobile Platform – Realtime Sync Plus Fully Open Source Database
#48Or, 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…
How is "conflict-free sync" done? The usual approach is last-write-wins, which is just a euphemism for "randomly losing user data", or CRDTs or Operational Transforms, which severely limit the data models one can sync.
I'm happy to learn about a silver bullet here.
Re: Realm Mobile Platform – Realtime Sync Plus Fully Open Source Database
#49Or, 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…
How is "conflict-free sync" done? The usual approach is last-write-wins, which is just a euphemism for "randomly losing user data", or CRDTs or Operational Transforms, which severely limit the data models one can sync.
I'm happy to learn about a silver bullet here.
Re: Realm Mobile Platform – Realtime Sync Plus Fully Open Source Database
#50Or, 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…
Oh, and while there is still room for improvement, we've improved the server-mobile sync case by an order of big-O-magnitude. And this is a first class design target for the future.