Add to favorites CBR spoke with Wayne Carter, Chief Architect of Mobile at Couchbase regarding the adoption of its Mobile Offline Sync and Database.
Taking an offline first approach is something that is quite new to developers, with Couchbase spending much of the last year educating developers on the benefits the approach, in addition to the benefits of its NoSQL database approach.
Moving away from traditional approaches like RAP, the company is creating a more efficient approach.
Carter, said: "It’s pretty different from the way developers have been building applications for the past 8 years, which is essentially the beginning of time as far as mobile as we know.
"Developers were using traditional RAP approaches and because this is so different we spent a good amount of time educating mobile developers on why building with a NoSQL database and synchronisation is so much better than RAP."
Momentum of the adoption for its solution really started to pick up at the beginning of the year, which Carter attributes to the good work it has put in with educating developers and a shifting desire for offline first.
The platform now has over 100,000 developers, up from a starting point of 3,000 last year, while over half of the growth has come in the past three months. Just over 50% are in the U.S. with Canada, India, the U.K and Germany following suit.
Some adopters of Couchbase include Ryanair, which significantly reduced the amount of data transfer needed by off -lining 10-15 different data types which were semi-static, meaning that they don’t change much, but when they do it needs to be reflected in real-time.
According to Carter, they were able to both reduce booking times on their app from five minutes to two and to reduce the amount of data transfer per day from 80Gb to 10Gb.
With this amount of data transferring comes some significant security challenges which the company is approaching in five ways.
"We have five areas where we focus on security, data at rest on both sides of the pipe needs to be encrypted and use file system encryption. We are adding data level encryption and data expiration policy to Couchbase live later this year.
"On the server side, the cloud database you can enable file system encryption, and then you have authentication challenges, which are built into think gateway. This is the internet facing component for the cloud and that allows authentication with both popular public authentication providers and custom providers.
"Then there is data access control, think gateway has very fine ring control over what users can see, both what data and who can change data."
Another area where the company is working is in the cross platform portability of data for interoperability between different platforms.
Carter, said: "We are focused on the portability at the data layer, the same data model and same database technology stack that we build for the iOS platform, we also build those for Android and the Java platform.
"So from a data perspective we are driving the data on one device type so that it is also consumable on other device types."
Looking forward and the company aims to continue to drive education and to build its ecosystem. As developers become savvier to the new approaches being used there will be increased demand for integrators and partners to help, which is where Couchbase is looking to expand.
