Couchbase "JSON Anywhere" Mobile Strategy: First NoSQL Database for Mobile

This post comes from Bob Wiederhold at the Couchbase blog.

Today we made another big announcement that has the potential to shake up the NoSQL landscape.  Our JSON Anywhere mobile strategy allows us to leapfrog the competition with significant new data management capabilities targeted specifically at mobile app developers. We also announced three new products associated with the strategy: Couchbase Lite, Couchbase Sync Gateway, and Couchbase Cloud.  Equally important, we announced broad industry support from mobile application development platform vendors that will make Couchbase’s mobile solution easily accessible to more than two million mobile developers.  You can read all about the new features and capabilities in other blog posts but I’d like to focus here on why I think this announcement is significant.

We are clearly now in a post-PC, mobile world.  The industry is rapidly approaching a key inflection point where consumers and workers are more likely to access applications from their mobile devices than from their laptops and desktops.  This trend will, of course, only continue as the processing power, memory, and network bandwidth of mobile devices increase.

The dramatic growth in mobile application usage is driving many enterprises to pursue a mobile first strategy.  Most of the mobile applications in the enterprise are data-centric and require increasingly sophisticated ways of managing, processing, and syncing data, while also taking into account the unique capabilities and constraints of mobile devices.

The increasing power of mobile devices combined with the increased sophistication of the applications that run on them is driving a growing need for a mobile database.  With a local database you can provide the great responsiveness users demand and allow apps to always be available whether a network connection is present or not.   To date, the only alternative developers had was a relational mobile database. And, if you wanted to sync with a back-end database you typically had to write the notoriously difficult code yourself.

Couchbase’s JSON Anywhere strategy simplifies a developer’s life by allowing you to use JSON on the device, JSON on the wire, and JSON in the cloud.  Couchbase Lite is a secure, ultra-lightweight JSON-based NoSQL database that sits on the mobile device.  Couchbase Sync Gateway is a companion product to Couchbase Server that syncs the mobile database with the database in the cloud and delivers a ten-fold reduction in the development time for syncing.  Couchbase Cloud provides a mobile database-as-a-service that eliminates the need for mobile developers to set up or manage their own back-end database.  Together, I think they provide a very compelling new data management solution for mobile app developers that will allow mobile app developers to build innovative new applications in a fraction of the time.