The Realm team has announced version 1.0 of its Realm Mobile Platform, aimed to make it possible to create mobile apps for iOS and Android with features such as automatic realtime data synchronization, realtime collaboration, live messaging, and more.
As InfoQ reported when Realm introduced the Mobile Platform as a beta last September, one of its main features is realtime data synchronization between clients and the server with automatic conflict resolution to seamlessly support offline-first development. Conflict resolution is, according to Realm, key in ensuring that the platform is always well behaved even in the face of lost or intermittent connectivity. Version 1.0 adds three new features, only available for the Enterprise Edition:
- Data Integration API, aimed to allow developers to connect their Realm-powered apps to existing data sources. At the time of the announcement, Realm only provides support for PostgreSQL sources, but Oracle, MongoDB, Hadoop, SAP HANA, and Redis connectors are expected to be released soon, says the company.
- Horizontal scalability, enabling the deployment of multiple instances of Realm Object Server to increase their capacity of handling connections. According to Realm, this makes it possible to support more than one million concurrent realtime users.
- Continuous data replication to a secondary server you can switch to in case of failure of the main one.
Realm Mobile Database, Realm Mobile Platform client-side component, is fully open source and available for a number of platforms, including iOS (Objective-C), Android, .NET/Xamarin, and Node.js. Realm Object Server can be deployed on-premises or in the public cloud, including AWS, Azure, and others.
The Realm Mobile Platform is available in three tiers:
- Developer edition, which provides realtime two-way data synchronization. It is free to use in production and with no time limits, including for commercial applications.
- Professional edition, which brings server-side access and event handling, meant to enable serverless apps by defining server-side handlers that are triggered by an object’s state change, as soon as it propagates to the server.
- Enterprise edition, which includes legacy data integration, scalability, and replication.
Realm Object Server can be installed on MacOS, or Linux, with rpm and dpkg packages provided.
