News

Realm Mobile Platform Adds .NET Core Support, Alongside Node.js

• By David Ramel
• August 16, 2017

Developers using the Realm Mobile Platform can now start doing their server-side coding with C#, which joins the existing Node.js back-end binding.

The new capability to use C# both client-side and server-side comes with yesterday's announcement that Realm's flagship mobile dev platform -- which received Xamarin support earlier this year -- now supports .NET Core, the open source offering based on the Microsoft .NET Framework. The .NET Core implementation, which just hit version 2.0, is described by Microsoft as a "cross-platform, open source, and modular .NET platform for creating modern Web apps, microservices, libraries and console applications" for Windows, Linux and Mac.

"With Realm .NET Core support, you can now integrate Realm on the server backend using C# (as an alternative to using our Node.js binding)," Realm's Craig Hosang said in a blog post. "Realm customers who specialize in .NET have expressed great interest in the addition of .NET Core support; these customers can now use a familiar framework while building the server-side components of their mobile apps. For instance, customers can now deploy scalable, Docker container-based microservices, all while using .NET and Realm. We're excited to support this new framework because it represents a dramatic expansion in capabilities for our .NET community of developers who are interested in adopting the latest development practices."

He said that because .NET Core uses many of the same components as the .NET Framework, developers can share code across the two in order to create server-side apps that meet requirements such as:

• Cross platform (Linux, MacOS, Windows)
• Docker container support (as a result of .NET Core running on Linux)
• Microservice architectures
• High performance and scalable systems
• Running apps side-by-side on the same server using different .NET versions

"By adding .NET Core support to the existing capabilities of the Realm Platform, it is also possible for an organization that prefers C# to use C# throughout their entire application supporting both client-side and server-side development," Hosang said. "You can build cross-platform apps for iOS and Android using Xamarin while also using .NET Core on the server to integrate existing back-end systems with Realm."

While the Realm platform provides data-syncing capabilities between client devices and back-end servers via the platform's separate Realm Mobile Database and Realm Object Server components, Hosang said tha for developers not needing such syncing, the standalone Realm database also supports .NET Core.

The company also promised more to come later this year, such as launching the Global Notifier and the Data Adapter for .NET Core, which will let devs integrate event handling into apps, along with fault-tolerant data transfer among legacy database systems. Also planned is Realm Mobile Platform support for two-way data sync on Windows.