CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaandroidjsonsqlite
KingFu
KingFu

Reputation: 1358

Storing JSON objects: SQLite vs serialization to disk

Will be building an app which will be pulling down JSON objects from a web service, in the low hundreds, each relatively small say 20kb each.

The app won't be doing much else than displaying these POJOs, downloading new and updated ones when available and deleting out of date ones. What would be the preferred method for persistent storage of these objects? I guess the two main contenders are storing them in a SQLite DB, maybe using ORMLite to cut down on the overhead, or just serialize the objects to disk, probably in one large file and use a very fast JSON parser.

Any ideas what would be the preferred method?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1558

Answers (2)

Gerbrand
Gerbrand

Reputation: 1633

You could consider using CouchDB as cache between the mobile client and your webservice.

CouchDB would have to run on a service on the internet, caching the objects from the webservice. On the client you can use TouchDB-Android: https://github.com/couchbaselabs/TouchDB-iOS/wiki/Why-TouchDB%3F . TouchDB-Android can synchronize automatically with CouchDB inatance running on the Internet. The application itself would then access TouchDB solely. TouchDB automatically detects wetter or not there's an internet-connection, so your application keeps running even without internet.

Advantages: - Caching of JSON calls - Client remains working with internet-connection down, synchronized automatically when internetconnection is up again. - Takes load of your webservice, and you can scale.

We used this setup before to allow Android software to work seamlessly, even when the internetconnetion would drop frequently and the service we accessed data from was quite slow and had limited capacity.

Upvotes: 1

gerrytan
gerrytan

Reputation: 41123

A dbms such as SQLLite should come with querying, indexing and sorting capabilities (and other standard SQL DBMS features), you should consider if you need any of these. How many objects are you planning to have in production environment? If say a million disk serialization approach might not scale.

Upvotes: 1

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