Couchbase Mobile Enables New Breed of Network-Independent Mobile Applications

Mountain View, Calif. – May 21, 2014 – Couchbase, Inc., provider of the most complete NoSQL database, has released Couchbase Mobile, a new suite of products, that will revolutionize mobile applications.  Couchbase Mobile eliminates the network connection as a limitation by giving developers productized mobile data synchronization and the world’s first and only native embedded NoSQL mobile database.  These new products make it possible for mobile application developers to quickly and easily build apps that meet the always-on expectations of today’s users.

“With Couchbase Mobile, we reimagined how mobile applications should be built. Until now, mobile applications were built with the requirement that data must be stored in the cloud because it has been too hard to store and sync data from the device,” said Bob Wiederhold, Couchbase CEO. “Couchbase Mobile changes all that. Our mobile products give developers everything they need to build always-available and always-responsive applications in a fraction of the time it currently takes.  With Couchbase Mobile, the network no longer impacts application performance. When the network is unavailable, the app just works.”

Enabling the Next Generation of Mobile Applications

Mobile applications are expected to work anytime or anywhere, regardless of the limits of network availability or the complexity required to enable data synchronization. But mobile app developers are limited in the apps they can build because current mobile databases are all relational and thus poorly suited to manage the many types of unstructured data generated by today’s mobile users. Additionally, no productized solution has existed for the synchronization of unstructured data that is shared between the cloud and the device. 

Couchbase Mobile changes all that. 

Couchbase Mobile delivers a solution that enables mobile app developers to meet the demand for always-available, always-responsive mobile applications. Couchbase Mobile includes three components: Couchbase Lite, Couchbase Sync Gateway and Couchbase Server. Taken together, these products provide mobile application developers with a powerful, new platform for creating robust and network-independent applications, simplifying the code needed to manage data synchronization and considerably reducing time to market.

“We welcome Couchbase Lite as a smart solution to address the needs of mobile developers building applications that rely on data synchronization and intermittent connectivity,” said Jon Udell, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.  “We have been using Couchbase Lite in Thali, an experiment to determine through open source prototypes what it takes to make the web truly peer-to-peer. Thali uses Couchbase Lite as a key component of its data replication platform.”

Couchbase Mobile Products

• Couchbase Lite: Couchbase Lite is a full featured, native embedded NoSQL mobile database built from the ground up for mobile. Lightweight in footprint, but delivering all the features of Couchbase Server, along with multi-master replication and conflict resolution. Data is secured during transport and on the device. In its first release, Couchbase Lite has native support for iOS, OSX, Android, Portable Java and Xamarin supported mobile platforms.
• Couchbase Sync Gateway: Couchbase Sync Gateway enables replication between Couchbase Lite on a mobile device and Couchbase Server in the cloud. In addition to replication, Sync Gateway handles user authentication, access control, data filtering, and data change validation
• Couchbase Server: For mobile applications that sync data with the cloud, Couchbase Server provides the most complete, most scalable NoSQL database built on a flexible JSON model. Couchbase Server makes it easy to modify applications without the constraints of a fixed database schema and delivers sub-millisecond, high-throughput reads and writes. Couchbase Server is easy to scale out, and supports topology changes with no downtime.

Couchbase Mobile Eco-System Quickly Forming

Further supporting rapid development and deployment of mobile applications, Couchbase is working with several cross platform development tool providers to deliver out of the box support for Couchbase Lite on the major mobile platforms: iOS, Android and .NET. 

Xamarin

Xamarin provides a native mobile application development platform that enables developers to write fully native mobile apps for iOS, Android and Windows in C#, sharing business logic, data access, networking code and other app logic code across device platforms.  Xamarin supports 100% of each device platforms APIs.  The result is native mobile apps with native interfaces that are built and maintained more efficiently thanks to code-sharing and reuse. In addition to announcing general availability of Couchbase Mobile, Couchbase also announced today the beta version of Couchbase Lite for .NET (LINK). Co-developed by Couchbase and Xamarin, Couchbase Lite for .NET gives the more than 600,000 developers using Xamarin a powerful new infrastructure to accelerate time to develop native mobile applications.

PhoneGap

PhoneGap is an open source development framework that provides a container for developers to wrap apps in, making it fast and easy to build mobile apps using the most popular web technologies: HTML, CSS and Javascript. The Couchbase Lite Plug-in for PhoneGap enables developers to build cross-platform mobile apps that are powered by Couchbase Lite by using PhoneGap and standard web technologies (HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript).  Developers simply build their Couchbase Lite powered mobile app, wrap it in a PhoneGap container, and then build executables for iOS and Android devices from the same code base.

“We no longer live in the pre-mobile world. Companies are moving to a mobile first mindset and enterprise IT is being called on to support that,” said Lyn Robison, Data Management Strategies Research Vice President, Gartner.  “But mobile application development teams have been challenged by a lack of infrastructure products at the data layer. A native mobile database with integrated sync will significantly reduce the hurdles faced by mobile application developers in today’s enterprise, allowing them to deliver apps that deliver business value all the time, with or without a connection.”

The Couchbase Mobile products are available for download at: http://mobile.couchbase.com