At our last MobileMonday Austin event we had the pleasure of having as guest speaker Nikunj Mehta, team leader of the Atom DB project at Oracle.
It really was a great technical presentation by Nikunj, where he discussed mobile web applications, synchronization and disconnected databases. He introduced AtomDB which in my opinion has great potential for mobile web applications and the problem of intermittent connectivity, caching and offline data synchronization. Nikunj and his team definitely understand the problem and have come up with a very interested solution, AtomDB.
AtomDB is a browser-runtime component (plug-in) that allows (mobile) web applications to have a data access layer with relational data management and networked data synchronization capabilities. AtomDB uses standard technologies such as JavaScript-based APIs, the Atom syndication format for transport (publishing), and the web browser itself. Because it is a browser extension (plug-in) only browsers with plug-in support can be extended with AtomDB (an obvious observation); they are first proving/validating the technology using Windows Mobile, and other browsers will follow, probably with support for WebKit-based browsers coming up next.
With AtomDB, the (mobile) web application doesn’t have to worry about connectivity and network details — from the application itself, the data may or not reside on the handset, and AtomDB takes care of connectivity and synchronization details. AtomDB is a relatively new project and is (research) work in progress. I totally recommend that you follow up on this project.
If you are interested in learning more about AtomDB, see Nikunj’s blog The Asymptotic Tight Bound blog.
Below are Nikunj’s presentation slides Mobile Data Access Using AtomDB:
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