on Feb 2nd, 2012Accessing a very large data set with mobile devices
A few months ago my colleague, Ralf Sternberg, wrote an article on “how to access a huge dataset with the web browser“. Now, if it’s possible to access very large datasets with a browser, wouldn’t it be really cool to access it in the same way with mobile devices?
As you may have heard, we launched RAP mobile two days ago. And, we did just that. With RAP mobile you can access exactly the same dataset with exactly the same code as in Ralf’s post. The dataset contains over 500,000 emails totaling over 2GB of space. Check out the screencast below and the source code on github.
What I find intriguing about this framework is that it is fast. There is no data on the phone. The information displayed in the UI is retrieved asynchronously from the server while the user is scrolling through this enormous set of data. The native iOS client takes care of the proper preloading, caching and memory management.
Related posts:
- Serving mobile devices with server-side apps
- Accessing a huge data set with the web browser
- Server-Side Apps with access to device functionality aka. accessing the iOS Geolocation API with Java.
- RAP mobile – iOS and Android apps written in Java
- RAP mobile 0.5.5 – New and Noteworthy
Hi,
I haven’t checked the code, but I have two quick questions:
- Do you cache results on the phone
- While testing the app, did the phone crash at any point?
Hi itoctopus,
- Do you cache results on the phone
Sure, the data I once received while scrolling is cached.
So we don’t need to ask the server for it, if the user scrolls back up.
But it’s only the data needed to display an entry. The real data objects (from the business model) is on the server in the Java world.
- While testing the app, did the phone crash at any point?
No. The SWT Tree widget for the RAP mobile client for iOS which is written in Objective-C is rock solid.