[ramses0]

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!

[andkon]

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 additional cognitive overhead when dealing with data that Realm simply handles properly for iOS from the beginning.

I'm deeply relieved to see that they're launching something that does something about the fragile ios architectures built around JSON. It's similar to what they did with their mobile database: they actually listened to what mobile devs found annoying, and then they built something that completely sidestepped all the fragility problems that emerge when you wrap sqlite with an ORM. Instead, they made an approach that fit within our workflow, as opposed to taking us further from it.

[ramses0]

Ahhh, got it. When I hear "offline-first" my mind's been in webdev-mobile, not appstore-mobile. Thanks for clarifying!

[janl]

CouchDB doesn't have any iOS code, are you perhaps referring to Couchbase?

[andkon]

Ohhh my god, you're totally right. I was looking at this: https://github.com/couchbase/couchbase-lite-ios

[dismantlethesun]

The things Realm adds are what CouchDB lacks. Those things are essentials from a certain point of view.