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Press Review Inno #2

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Translation by Jacob Cook

Mobility

FireStore: The New Real-time Database from Google

By Thibault Wittemberg

Mobile developers are often confronted with a recurring puzzle when they develop apps. It is the question of how best to manage data synchronization with a server back-end in both online and offline modes?

Google provides us with a new answer to this question with its FireStore service. This service is part of the Firebase suite and is currently in beta testing. It is presented as Google’s new preferred solution for real-time data storage. The solution is based on a document-oriented storage model (NoSQL), which means that we store collections of key/value data, like JSON objects.

FireStore can transparently manage the synchronization of data between multiple mobile devices in addition to the effortless handling of lost connections. This means that, in case of a network outage or disconnection, data remains locally accessible and updates to it will be performed transparently once the connection can be re-established. Below you can find two YouTube tutorials by Brian Advent. They show how easy the integration of FireStore can be in an example of messaging application.

Two FireStore SDK integration tutorials for iOS, by Brian Advent:

Also, you can access FireStore official documentation.

RxSwift 4, with Swift 4 Support, Announces the First Release Candidate Version

With each new release of the Swift programming language, developers work feverishly to update their libraries and support the latest version. This has definitely been the case for the developers behind RxSwift, who deployed the first release candidate of RxSwift 4 on October 8th.  This version is available via the different Swift package management solutions as well as on Github. The authors of RxSwift encourage open source contributions, for which you can find the rules in the repo.

Discovering the Architecture of Model-View-Intent

I thought I knew everything I needed to know about the MVI architecture, after all the name is fairly clear. For me, an Intent = new Intent(). With this, I initially believed it would fall into an architecture pattern based on Android Intents, and I was under the impression that a lot of spaghetti code would be required to replace RX by IntentReceivers/Broadcasters. This seemed like a big step back to me. However, during Droidcon NYC, my colleagues who were present were able to participate in a presentation on MVI where they gained invaluable and cool experiences.

I rolled up my sleeves and got to work in playing with MVI. First, I found this article by Hannes Dorfmann. It explains the advantages of MVI in a very didactic way. MVI addresses a problem that is often ignored by other patterns like MVVM or MVP: the state. By implementing a Reducer, we are able to manage the state changes of the application in a deterministic fashion.

Hannes Dorfmann proposes an implementation of MVI. However, it is written in Java and uses inheritance. The next step is to propose an implementation in Kotlin by composition/protocol.

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