Archive for Me

| January 7, 2021
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Building a Mobile Chat App Using Realm – Data Architecture

I’ve just built an iOS chat app using SwiftUI, Realm, and Realm Sync. I decided on a chat app as it makes an interesting case study for designing a data model and controlling who can access what data:

  • A chat message needs to be viewable by all members of a chat room and no one else.
  • New messages must be pushed to the chat room for all online members in real-time.
  • The app should notify a user that there are new messages even when they don’t have that chat room open.
  • Users should be able to observe the “presence” of other users (e.g., whether they’re currently logged into the app).
  • There’s no limit on how many messages users send in a chat room, and so the data structures must allow them to grow indefinitely.

Because this app’s data model (and the decisions taken when designing) serve as a great starting point for many different types of apps, I wrote it up in this HowTo article.

You can download all of the code from the GitHub repo.

Checkout Building a Mobile Chat App Using Realm – Data Architecture for all of the details.





Category: Me, MongoDB, Realm, Uncategorized | Tags: , , ,
| December 1, 2020
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Building an iOS app with Realm, SwiftUI, & Combine

I’m relatively new to building iOS apps (a little over a year’s experience), and so I prefer using the latest technologies that make me a more productive developer. That means my preferred app stack looks like this:
In 🔥 Out ❄️
Swift Objective C
SwiftUI UIKit
Combine RxSwift
Realm Core Data
MongoDB Realm Sync (where needed) Home-baked cross-platform data sync
I built a simple, distributed task management app on that stack, and wrote it up in “Build Your First iOS Mobile App Using Realm, SwiftUI, & Combine”. To continue my theme on being productive, I borrowed heavily from MongoDB’s official iOS Swift tutorial: You can download all of the code for the front end app from the GitHub repo. Checkout Build Your First iOS Mobile App Using Realm, SwiftUI, & Combine for all of the details.




Category: Me, MongoDB, Realm | Tags: ,
| April 8, 2009
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Introduction

Just a quick introduction to begin with.

Me with my kids

I joined Sun Microsystems in Feb 2009 to look after the product management for MySQL Cluster and MySQL replication.

I started my career with Nortel (technically BNR which was the R&D arm of Northern Telecom but everything later got merged and rebranded as Nortel). I was responsible for writing the original proprietary, in-memory database for Nortel’s HLR product. Later on, we used a number of 3rd party databases for the HLR (provisioning rather than real-time) and then HSS – starting with Oracle for the HLR and then SOLID but then settling on MySQL Cluster as the scaleable real-time database for the HSS.

When I left Nortel (via an IBM rebadging) I moved to Sun, hoping to use my experience as a MySQL Cluster customer to help the team build upon their strong product.

So far, so good – I’ve been really impressed both with the MySQL team and with how well the product is doing both with telco companies and others.

I’m planning on using this blog to publish technical content, publicise product information as well as anything else that crops up.





Category: Me | Tags: , , , ,