Mobile local replicated databases like Couchbase lite, Parse.com or Claudant can replace the web services tier?
It seems that mobile local databases with sync capabilities are gaining momentum in the mobile scene. This approach allows you to effortlessly replicate data from the backend to the application (and vice versa). You don't need to write all this code in the application and backend to exchange information. This sounds amazing, right?
But I was wondering in which cases replication would not be effective. What are the pros and cons of this approach? I am especially worried about too much data consumption on the mobile side and finding information not related to the local database.
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I would say that the replication approach available in CouchDB, Couchbase Mobile, PouchDB ... actually saves data consumption as there is a local database at each end of replication. Instead of storing data in a cache that could potentially be invalid over time, the Sync approach looks for differences on each side and outputs what is missing and needs to be sent.
However, the sync approach is not suitable for all use cases. If we present an example of a location based mobile app. There may be a function to search for content around users' locations. It would be impractical to replicate the entire backend database to the device in order to make this request. You can use REST API calls for these types of requests. And once the user has bookmarks with bookmarks, use a sync approach to make them available to all registered devices.
In the case of Couchbase Mobile, the filtered sync is handled by the sync feature and the REST API can be used to query the server side database.
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