Couchio, the company founded by Damien Katz, creator of CouchDB, has announced the release of CouchDB SDK for Android, a mobile version of the document database that can be used offline.
CouchDB SDK for Android is a developer preview version (v. 0.5) and yet not optimized for the mobile platform but it is fully compatible with CouchDB 1.0 and the API is promised to be stable.
One of the advertised features is CouchDB’s ability to replicate itself to different servers and offline systems which is useful for mobile applications that are designed to run online/offline. The application can store its data offline on the device, and will sync it with the server when the device goes online:
CouchDB for Android allows shared applications to work offline by automatically synchronizing between platforms, alleviating a common pain point for users. Developers no longer have to develop an application once for the web, once for each mobile platform and then synchronize between the two. …
With CouchDB on Android, developers can build applications and access their data freely across devices, desktops or in the cloud, regardless of the network.
Another mobile platform, Palm’s webOS, will have the ability to sync with CouchDB in the cloud by the end of this fall as announced by Dion Almaer in May.
The SDK works on Android 2.1 and 2.2 and can downloaded from Github or the Android Marketplace.