Database Reference
In-Depth Information
As we discussed at the beginning of this chapter, it is not a very scalable
design, but in situations where a formal stand-alone database is overkill, this
design actually works quite well. There is no user configuration, and there is
no need to set up an external application; we just start one application on
one machine and another application on another and let them talk. The
biggest gotcha is with the
NSManagedObjectContext
. As long as we don't try to
share it across distributed objects, we can use Core Data fairly transparently.
The design built here can also be used in a peer environment, as opposed to
the client-server design. Multiple peers could use Bonjour to discover each
other and use distributed objects to sync their data stores so that each device
has a complete and up-to-date copy of the data set. In a situation like that,
users could have our application on each of their machines, and whenever
they are near each other (that is, on the same local network), they would
automatically update each other. Talk about a pleasant user experience!
