New libraries to sync mobiles with back end databases

The increasing dominance of smartphones and tablets as the client device of choice for all kinds of end user – from consumer to road-warrior business professional – makes it imperative that the synchronisation of data between those mobile devices and back-end database systems is of the highest calibre.

That need as led to a proliferation of mobile backend-as-a-service (MBaaS) providers, which in turn has pointed to a need for data to be seamlessly shared, stored and replicated between devices and the cloud. What has become apparent is that there is now a requirement for specialised mobile development platforms, tools that can help remove the complexity of managing local data on mobile devices and replicating it on back-end database systems, enabling developers to focus on the application user experience.

Cloudant’sanswer to thishas been to introduce open source, native software libraries for Android and iOS, making it easier for developers to manage and replicate mobile application data on phones, tablets and other occasionally connected devices. The company claims to be the producer of the world's first globally distributed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) for loading, storing, analysing, and distributing operational application data for developers of large web and mobile applications.

Known as Cloudant Sync for Android and Cloudant Sync for iOS, both are immediately available under Apache License Version 2.0 for developers working with Cloudant’s NoSQL DBaaS. Both libraries are also API-compatible with Apache CouchDB.

“New technologies such as Cloudant Sync can help remove the complexity of managing and replicating local data on mobile devices, enabling developers to focus on the application user experience.”

Cloudant Sync helps mobile developers build offline access into their applications. The software libraries provide a simplified API with a device-local database indexing and query layer designed to more closely match the expectations of mobile developers than the cloud database semantics of other mobile sync libraries.

It stores application data to a device's local database, enabling applications to collect and access data even if network connectivity is unavailable. When devices re-establish connectivity, the software synchronises changes with a remote Cloudant or CouchDB database.

Cloudant Sync implements a native code-friendly API for managing JSON documents and can also work in conjunction with popular MBaaS platforms like Parse, StackMob and Kinvey.

It also features local indexing and querying, management of conflicting documents, and support for binary attachments, and permits a high volume of local datastores to synchronise with remote databases simultaneously, allowing developers to scale apps in proportion with growing user bases.

Because it is built on the company’s 24/7 DbaaS management and scalable infrastructure, developers do not have to build and manage their own. In addition, Cloudant states that its commitment to open source technologies can help prevent vendor lock-in to one set of tools or cloud platforms.

“Keeping with our commitment to open technologies, we’re open-sourcing the code for Cloudant Sync,” said Dan DeMichele, Cloudant vice president of product. “A fast adoption rate for the product helps Cloudant as a company, of course, but we hope to see the community porting Cloudant Sync to other mobile operating systems and adding support for new replication protocols that can synchronise devices with other cloud databases. Making our products as open as possible gives our customers more options to avoid lock-in.”

Developers and their applications use Cloudant Sync to store, index and query local JSON documents on a single device and to synchronise data across many devices and remote cloud databases. The Android library currently supports creating, updating and deleting documents (database CRUD).

It also enables developers to incorporate bidirectional sync between a remote database in the cloud and a local datastore controlled by the application, which is the feature that allows users to manipulate data even when devices are not connected to the Internet.