News

Realm Mobile Platform 1.0 Arrives

• By David Ramel
• January 20, 2017

After starting with a mobile object database designed to replace SQLite, Realm has steadily expanded its portfolio, yesterday announcing the 1.0 edition of a mobile development platform.

The Realm Mobile Platform 1.0 combines that original mobile database with Realm Object Server to handle object data synchronization and event handling.

With the full platform and its offline-first functionality, developers can more easily build "reactive" apps for use cases such as real-time collaboration and live messaging, the company said.

"As a developer, you don't need to write or maintain networking code or do any serialization, Realm handles the sync for you -- you can be sure that the data on the device is always synchronized with the data on the server," the company said in a blog post. "Realm also makes it easy to create server-side logic to react instantly to changes in data, and build integrations to existing systems and APIs."

Running only on Linux or macOS, the Realm Object Server can be hosted on-premises or in public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and so on.

Realm offers its wares in various editions, including a free and open source mobile database and a free Developer Edition of the mobile platform. For the top-level Enterprise Edition, it announced the following new features:

• Realm Data Integration API: This lets customers connect and synchronize in real time a mobile application with existing back-end database systems of record such as Oracle, MongoDB, Hadoop, SAP HANA, Postgres and Redis. This reportedly opens up high-value legacy and third-party APIs for use in fully modern and highly responsive mobile applications.
• Horizontal scaling: The company said this lets developers seamlessly combine multiple Realm Object Server instances to easily scale to serve millions of simultaneous users.
• Continuous backup: Built-in backup functionality ensures customers that their user and app data is continuously and automatically preserved in the event of a disaster.

"For companies using mobile apps to extend their existing business and brand, the Realm Data Integration API is an ideal way to connect the apps with their existing systems and processes," the company said in a statement. "For example, if a retailer wants to create a mobile application using the Realm Mobile Platform, they can create a direct connection from Realm to their database to ensure that mobile transactions register accurately in their existing database system of record. This also helps the retailer mobilize their existing data and add real-time synchronization."

The blog post discusses the real-time collaboration features in the context of a Draw demo app available for download from GitHub.