Accessing 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 Tabris (previously RAP Mobile) two days ago. And, we did just that. With Tabris 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.