Valentina for iPhone - Discussion.

[gary hayenga]

On Dec 10, 2008, at 7:40 AM, valentina-request at lists.macserve.net wrote:

>
> If a simple interface is too simple to be useful, an interface with  
> a lot of
> common sense set as default would do nicely.
> Most iPhone apps only use a handful of tables and few views.

Actually there is a very good Cocoa/Objective-C wrapper for SQLite3 on  
the iPhone, called FMDB, by Gus Mueller, or I have also used Plausible  
Database, which is based on FMDB.  These are free and provide a clean  
and easy to use set of Objective-C classes.

I haven't used *large* datasets on the iPhone, but SQLite feels quite  
quick.  You can also compile your own version of SQLite and include  
that, if for instance you want full-text indexing, that isn't included  
in the version on the iPhone.

The advantages I can see that Valentina would have over SQLite would  
be it's support for foreign key constraints, nested transactions and  
more complete alter table support.  That is the SQL92 things of  
course, not counting the extra Valentina features.  Speed might be an  
advantage as database size grows, but mainly there could be a  
tremendous synching advantage here.   There aren't currently any  
database drivers, including ODBC, for the iPhone, so any communication  
with MySQL or other RDBMs can't simply be done with binary data over  
TCP/IP, but has to be done via web services and XML, if it could be  
done with VServer, and the licensing fees weren't too onerous, that  
would be extremely useful.

The (possible) disadvantages that I see are, the size overhead it  
would add to each app and possibly how much RAM it uses.  I've only  
used Valentina 1 and 2 so perhaps 3 is much better in the RAM usage  
department, but the iPhone has less than 100 meg of available RAM  
(after the OS takes it's share) and no virtual memory.