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Realm, whose mobile database helps power most of the world’s most-used smartphone applications, on Dec. 12 released a freemium version of its Realm Mobile Platform for the benefit of mobile app developers.
Realm Mobile Platform Professional Edition includes an unusually number of high-end features in a freely available toolset for mobile development teams. These include real-time data synchronization, event handling and business-level support SLAs (response within one business day), plus critical patches and upgrades.
“From the Realm perspective, the two pieces of news that matter to the market are first, in Professional Edition, we can bring some of the more powerful features of Realm Mobile Platform to a broader audience, which is free and available to anybody,” Realm Chief Marketing Officer Paul Kopacki told eWEEK. “Second, we have the Enterprise Edition, which is aimed at the largest use cases.
“Professional Edition creates that middle of the market space, where we can reach a bunch more developers and give them these key features, like two-way sync and event handling, so they can build cool apps–like the thing [Watson] that IBM built.”
With this release, Realm is providing professional development teams at small and mid-sized companies with a breakthrough new approach for building responsive and high-quality applications that were previously only possible for companies with large development teams and huge budgets, Kopacki said.
Realm’s database powers mobile apps used by Google, McDonalds, eBay, IBM, Cisco Systems, Alibaba, Walmart and hundreds of others.
Along with with the launch of Realm Mobile Platform Professional Edition, San Francisco-based Realm also announced the availability of Realm Scanner, a new open source mobile demo application built together with the IBM Cloud and Mobile team.
Realm Scanner brings together the IP of Realm and IBM to allow users to take a picture of anything and then send the image to IBM’s powerful Watson Visual Recognition API that quickly processes text, recognizes faces and handles other complex image interpretation tasks. The user then gets real-time results, thanks to Realm Mobile Platform Professional Edition’s two-way instant synchronization and event-handling technology.
The app demonstrates capabilities applicable for a variety of applications, including location identification for virtual reality applications, face recognition for security, categorizing images for industrial and scientific applications, reading labels in retail applications, and much more.
Realm’s mobile platform was launched in 2014, and the Realm Mobile Database is the most popular third-party database in the world, enabling high-performance user experiences for more than a billion users of mobile apps.
The demo application and all of its code is available on GitHub as a free open-source project for developers to use, starting today.
The Realm Mobile Platform Professional Edition is available today for purchase and as a 60-day free trial here. Pricing starts at $1,500 per month. The Scanner demo app is available as a free open-source project on GitHub.