Realm Mobile Platform – Realtime Sync Plus Fully Open Source Database

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&#x27;ve done some interesting stuff with it :)<p>Main benefits I saw:<p><pre><code> * faster performance * simpler multi-threading * built-in encryption based on ios&#x27; commoncrypto (fips 140-2 module) * fast response time to questions on github (in 3 cases) </code></pre> Main drawbacks:<p><pre><code> * no icloud syncing. I need to check out the new syncing stuff... * new-ish database so does not have ALL features (e.g., multi-process encrypted access). They appear to work quickly to implement features the community cares about. * performance is fairly &quot;magical&quot;. I understand normal database query performance, realm is different... * No in-place VACCUUM-type functionality. I&#x27;ve had issues with the realm database file growing unexpectedly large.</code></pre>

Former Realm employee here.<p>So glad to see the team finally launch this. I&#x27;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.<p>I&#x27;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!<p>From engineering to marketing, product &amp; founders I know they&#x27;ve sweated to get here and I&#x27;m just so, so happy for them.<p>I know they will make a lot of developers and customers happy, and for that I say: bravo.

Or, you know, support an open source alternative like PouchDB&#x2F;CouchDB. Sync, conflict resolution, offline-first, and data push are all supported. Not to mention it&#x27;s a very stable, mature ecosystem.<p>There are even enterprise-ready setups using CouchDB (like Cloudant) for those that want it.

Congrats on the big release.<p>I remember I was using very early version of Realm in the one of the Android apps I was working on at that time. It was not working properly for me, unfortunately. Random Segmentation faults and limitations that one have to use the POJO extended from the RealmObject. So, I eventually switched back to SQLite (plus ORMLite).<p>I have seen a lot of changes and now I think I would definitely consider giving it a try.<p>One question that I have is even though it&#x27;s nice to have self-hosted Realm Object Server, are there any plans or timeline that it&#x27;s going to be open-sourced ?

I found Realm to be very easy to use with React Native. I had trouble using the other tools to save data inside my React Native apps. Anyone else been in the same situation?

Any updates on the C++ API and lib? It&#x27;s been pending since a year[1] and there are no updates :-(<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;realm&#x2F;realm-cocoa&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2198" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;realm&#x2F;realm-cocoa&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2198</a>

Definitely going to try this out. However, I don&#x27;t feel great about not having...<p>- any concept of clustering for reliability and failover - any easy&#x2F;clear way to distribute load to the object server - an easy way to run backups<p>I may just be blind in the docs. I really don&#x27;t want to go back to running my own database server. Services like compose.io are soooo nice. Clustering, automatic failover, backups...

Another Core Data alternative to try is YapDatabase: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yapstudios&#x2F;YapDatabase" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yapstudios&#x2F;YapDatabase</a><p>It is similar to Realm in a lot of ways, with a simple concurrency model, and native objects (key&#x2F;value&#x2F;collection). It&#x27;s built on top of SQLite so you can use extensions like secondary indexes, full text search, RTree. You can also use SQLCipher for full database encryption, and there&#x27;s another extension to do automatic syncing via CloudKit.<p>Caveats are it only runs on Apple platforms, doesn&#x27;t have cross platform sync, and isn&#x27;t backed by VC funding. If you need those things then Realm is definitely your best choice.

So this is like alternative to Firebase? How different is their offering?

Congrats!<p>Realm and React Native is now my go-to, keep up the solid work :)

Congrats! This is a major step forward which we will be supporting in our product. Its right now being used by close to 500k users :)<p>Question - TLDR - Is p2p synchronization possible?<p>Two databases in two different devices in the same network, is it possible to achieve synchronization without having access to a server?

I wanna build a POS app and need a solid sync experience. I&#x27;m building my own but obviously prefer to use something else ;)<p>This could support multiple users against a master database editing and getting up-to-date(as possible) data? And sync reliable?

It says the database is open source but I can&#x27;t find any link to the source code. Is both the client and server open source?

Can someone explain why use Realm, or CouchDB, over SQLite?

Any plans for a browser version?

We&#x27;ve updated the link from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;realm.io&#x2F;products&#x2F;realm-mobile-platform&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;realm.io&#x2F;products&#x2F;realm-mobile-platform&#x2F;</a> to this introductory page.

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.