Replication framework for iPad/iPhone

Question

I need peer-to-peer replication for an iPad application (MonoTouch or SDK).

The best thing would of course be suggestions....

But also hints about where to look. Normally this would be a feature of the database, but perhaps with the IOS model (multi-processing etc) it would have to be a library for my application?

Would it be much the same for MonoTouch and SDK? Should I generally look at code for SQLite?

This would be for peer-to-peer transactional replication between iPads in a network. There can also be a server on the web.

Installation/security are not issues.

Answer 1

I don't know MonoTouch, but if it provides the same APIs as are exposed to Objective-C programs, there's quite a bit of stuff already provided for these kind of tasks.

You might want to look to NSCoding for a way of handling the serialisation of arbitrary objects. Also, since persistence and replication face many of the same issues, you might want to at least take inspiration from Core Data when deciding how it should all work.

Answer 2

We use WCF + SQLite to replicate data from the server to the app in Festival Star. Works ok - can get a bit complex.

WRT serialization of objects as a means to achieve persistence - don't - unless it's small amounts of data and that is always likely to be the case.

This caused us a lot of pain and I've had to spend a lot of time refactoring and re-testing everything. Serialization is for comms IMO.