Couchio, “corporate sponsor of the CouchDB post-relational database,” on Aug. 12 announced the availability of the first release of a CouchDB software development kit for mobile devices running Google’s Android operating system.
The CouchDB for Android SDK is available as a free download. The company said, “Designed to take full advantage of CouchDB’s peer-to-peer sync facilities, CouchDB for Android allows developers to build Web or native applications that work even if the Internet connection is slow, intermittent or completely down. With continuous access to a local copy of data, developers can leverage their existing knowledge about Web technologies to quickly build collaborative business applications on mobile devices.”
CouchDB is described by Wikipedia as “a free and open-source document-oriented database written in the Erlang programming language. It is a NoSQL product designed for local replication and to scale vertically along a wide range of devices.”
According to the Apache CouchDB project homepage, “Apache CouchDB is a document-oriented database that can be queried and indexed in a MapReduce fashion using JavaScript. CouchDB also offers incremental replication with bidirectional conflict detection and resolution.”
Couchio said in its Aug. 12 statement, “CouchDB for Android allows shared applications to work offline by automatically synchronizing between platforms, alleviating a common pain point for users. Developers no longer have to develop an application once for the Web [and] once for each mobile platform and then synchronize between the two.”
“Our goal is to provide users with a kick-ass SDK for Android devices [with which] to build Web and native applications using CouchDB as the device- native data store,” Couchio CEO Damien Katz, creator of CouchDB, said in the statement. “CouchDB now makes sync ubiquitous and part of the mobile computing fabric.”
Indeed, “One of the big things about CouchDB is replication, so you can have Web-based apps and run those directly on your Android device,” Katz told eWEEK.
“The data on the phone is all synchronized through our cloud service,” Katz added. “The mobile platforms in general are a really strong use case for CouchDB. The reason we picked Android as our first phone platform is it’s very open.”
Couchio’s statement concluded:
““With CouchDB on Android, developers can build applications and access their data freely across devices, desktops or in the cloud, regardless of the network. Palm has already announced that the next version of [its] WebOS will include services for syncing local data with CouchDB.For more information about CouchDB on Android, or to download it for free, visit http://www.couch.io/android. From an Android device, users can directly install CouchDB through the Android Marketplace.”“