Restkit + Rails API or TouchDB + CouchDB?

Question

Any of you out there got the answer to what model is more trivial to iOS cloud data driven apps?

Restkit + RESTful API or TouchDB + CouchDB?

Answer 1

There is really hard to answer your question without know what you want to do. You can certainly make both works for different use cases.

There are a couple of things to consider:

• If offline mode is important.

TouchDB is a full functional nosql datastore running on the device, and it allows user to read and write data even without connection. Restkit needs a connection to fully work.

• Size the dataset to replicate

TouchDB will replicate data to the device, and it is easier if you have relative small dataset. The size is measured by how many documents in your database, and also the size of documents.

Also, most of time device only need to do a full replication when app starts (initial replication), so you can get around this (embedded most of data into the app apk itself for example) and only replicate delta.

By the way, you can certainly use both, and get the benefits of both.

Answer 2

Employing CouchDB+TouchDB completely takes the hassle of sync away from you. You don't need to care about sync, it just works. You get a notification upon sync, update your UI, that's it.

Replacing the Core Data stack with TouchDB is also fairly easy. The model objects basically stay the same, only that they now inherit from CouchModel instead of NSManagedObject. It's nearly trivial.

Querying is slightly different from Core Data. You define a set of views (indexes) that slice and sort your data along different criteria, and then query these indexes with a start and end key. So, there's no explicit query language, but that's no inconvenience, really.

I've moved a Core Data app to TouchDB, and it was completely painless. In about 3 days, I had CRUD and sync up and running.