Achievement Unlocked: Beta Release of Couchbase Mobile for iOS

Mobile synchronization is a hard problem, and one that is becoming more important everyday. More users have multiple devices, and applications these days are built to allow people to share and collaborate on data. Developers have to contend with spotty connections and the high latency of mobile broadband. Any application that depends on a remote server for interactivity is frequently unusable in these real world conditions.

Couchbase Mobile is designed from the ground up to address these problems so you don't have to. By using Couchbase Mobile, you can concentrate on writing your application, and let your database worry about keeping everything synchronized with the cloud. With a little configuration you can address use cases from live backups to realtime multi-user document editing. The underlying Couchbase data model ensures you can easily interoperate with remote services and easily build web interfaces for your iOS applications.

Today we are releasing the Beta version of Couchbase Mobile for iOS. This is essentially a release candidate for our GA (general availability) release. What we are saying by tagging this “Beta” is that it is largely feature-complete and stable. In the weeks between now and the GA release we will focus extensively on performance and longevity testing.

There are two big features in this Beta release that haven’t been in past releases: GeoCouch, and CouchCocoa.

GeoCouch allows you to do geographic queries directly on the device. Phones these days can easily hold the entire list of apartments available for rent in your city. Now you can show the nearby apartments to your user, even if they are out of cell range. We hope you come up with even more creative ways to use GeoCouch in the real world.

CouchCocoa is a native client library for Couchbase. If you prefer NSTableViews to HTTP and JSON, you will feel right at home with CouchCocoa. It has deep support for the Couchbase API, from the _changes feed to replication configuration, as well as providing seamless interaction with Cocoa's object model.

For the purposes of development, you can consider the Beta release ready for everything you can throw at it. We won’t change anything major in the API between now and GA. So go ahead and relax: on your phone, in the cloud, or wherever you want Couchbase.