Developer Preview of Couchbase Mobile - Apache CouchDB for iOS devices | Hacker News Reader

Developer Preview of Couchbase Mobile - Apache CouchDB for iOS devices

github.com

51 pointsjchrisa17 comments

This is a good time to self-link to trundle: https://github.com/schwa/trundle

Trundle is my Objective-C (iOS! Mac OS X!) framework to communicate with CouchDB servers. The guys at CouchBase use it in the demo for Couchbase Mobile

Nice work. For android devs there is also:

https://github.com/couchbaselabs/libcouch-android

and

https://github.com/couchbaselabs/couch-android-launcher

Both supported by couchbase officially.

I'm an iOS developer that has no idea what CouchDB is other than another database system. I'm a little confused as to what CouchDB Mobile is. Is it at another database engine I can use to locally persist my data on the device (like an improved SQLite), or is it some kinda of API system that can be used to communicate directly with a CouchDB hosted on a server without the need for a REST API to be created to manage the interaction?

Apache CouchDB is an open-source database that stores JSON and runs in resource constrained environments. It's killer feature is that the data it holds can be shared across multiple users and devices in near realtime. Did I mention that CouchDB is also a web server?

Mobile Couchbase is a package of Apache CouchDB designed for iOS. It is pre-Beta right now, but we are taking the wraps off the source because we've had an application that uses it approved by Apple for sale in the App Store. We are soliciting open source contributions and feedback from users.

Okay, I checked out your site and you guys have me at "CouchDB provides a RESTful JSON API than can be accessed from any environment that allows HTTP requests."

To put it mildly, this sounds fucking awesome. I have no idea why I haven't checked this out sooner.

Its another database engine that you can use to locally persist data, the main upside is that the data you locally persist can be synced online with CouchDB's replication.

http://guide.couchdb.org/draft/replication.html

Good going Dale, you must be pleased to get it out...

I'm really excited for this. It seems like having CouchDB available on iOS will make it fairly easy to build apps that require synchronization to the web backend after being offline.

The web backend needs to use CouchDB, right?

I haven't worked with CouchDB yet, but I believe the answer is yes, since the syncing is done using CouchDB's replication features

"If you <3 CouchApps, you can deploy them as iOS apps." - Love this one!

Don't forget to come to the meetup tonight if you are in SF (see the bottom of the article for details).

I think it'll be very interesting to see people distributing and replicating CouchApps. This could allow us to potentially skip completely the AppStore and have our own CouchAppStore.

For now we are aiming at a use case where developers would embed Couchbase in their app and sell it in the App Store. I kinda doubt Apple would approve for sale (free?) a generic CouchApp player. But still there is lots to gain from being able to sell your CouchApps in the App Store.

That violates the Apple developer ToS. See what happened to Scratch on the iPad.

Yeah, this would be nice, but it is also totally understandable that it is not allowed. "Just" adding reliable sync to native iOS apps and single-package CouchApps is cool enough :)

I've been waiting for this for months. Pretty excited about this.

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