Mobile data sync in a blink
Nitin Agrawal, Akshat Aranya, Cristian Constantin Ungureanu · 2013
Mobile applications are becoming increasingly data-centric – often relying on cloud services to store, share, and analyze data. App developers have to frequently manage the local storage on the device (e.g., SQLite databases, file systems), as well as data synchronization with cloud services. Developers have to address com-mon issues such as data packaging, handling network failures, supporting disconnected operations, propagat-ing changes, and detecting and resolving conflicts. To free mobile developers from this burden, we are building Simba, a platform to rapidly develop and deploy data-centric mobile apps. Simba provides a unified storage and synchronization API for both structured data and unstruc-tured objects. Apps can specify a data model spanning ta-bles and objects, and atomically sync such data with the cloud without worrying about network disruptions. Simba is also frugal in consuming network resources. 1