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Cloudant is a must have tool for mobile developers
January 04, 2016

Cloudant is a must have tool for mobile developers

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloudant

I am the founder of my 1 person startup, which develops a mobile application for virtual Stock Trading. The mobile app originally stored all user data (their portfolio, watchlist, account balance etc.) on the device itself. There were several scenarios where users ended up losing their app's data, for example hardware upgrades, OS upgrades on the same device, factory reset of the device. Also, because data was stored locally on the mobile device, users were tied down to using only one device.


The problems Cloudant solves for this app:


1. Persisting user's across physical device upgrades, OS upgrades on the same device, factory reset of the device, uninstall-reinstall of the application.


2. Synchronizing data between multiple devices for the same user giving them a true cloud experience which was lacking before.


As of now, I only have one product and it uses Cloudant. However I am extremely pleased with my experience with Cloudant and plan to use Cloudant for my future products as well.

  • Wide array of client-side libraries (Android, iPhone, Java PHP, JavaScript to name a few) provided by Cloudant make development easier and streamlined.
  • It is not JUST a DB - Ability to write JavaScript code on the Cloudant server makes it function as a web service provider along with a DB.
  • Cloudant is a true DBaaS provider. It is as close to one-click setup as it can be, and deployments take almost no time.
  • Cloudant provides bidirectional data replication
  • REST APIs
  • Per-document read privileges would be nice
  • Content Push - It would be good to see an in-built feature where a pool of clients can be linked to one or more documents so every time a document changes, the pool of clients linked to that document are notified of changes.
  • Provide a few templates for creating Filters on the DB.
I have used MongoDB prior to using Cloudant. For me Cloudant is a winner because the learning curve is not as steep as MongoDB. I also looked into using DynamoDB (AWS) but the set up was quite complicated so I gave up and tried to use Cloudant.
Cloudant is well suited for scenarios in multiple cases:
1. Developers don't want to learn about setting up a database etc., and would rather focus on writing code to use the database.
2. An organization does not have dedicated resources to set up and maintain a database.
3. Writing micro-web services - in such a case, an organization can use Cloudant both as a DB and as a web server instead of setting up and maintaining two separate servers.
4. If an organization supports multiple client platforms, Cloudant is the way to go because it provides multiple client libraries as well as a REST API.

IBM Cloudant Reliability

* Bi-directional replication
* Automatic distribution of data across multiple servers