ANN: Couchbase Mobile 1.1 GA now available

[Zachary Gramana]

We’re proud to announce the general availability of Couchbase Mobile 1.1, our biggest release since 1.0 last year. 

You can start your downloaders by jumping to the couchbase.com downloads page. If you’re an Android/Java user, 1.1 is already on JCenter/Maven Central. If you are a .NET user, 1.1 is already on Nuget.

Release Highlights

Note: The links on the product headings below will take you to the detailed release notes, which include issues resolved, detailed download instructions, support information and any additional requirements.

Sync Gateway

1.  A new integration mechanism: Webhooks. With this release, we are beginning to expose an event model to which you can add handlers. This makes it even easier to integate Couchbase Mobile with line of business applications, 3rd party services and apps, etc.

2.  PouchDB compatibility. Extend your Couchbase Mobile user experience to your HTML5/JavaScript apps.

3.  Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) support. Enable Sync Gateway to respond to HTTP requests that origin from one or more approved external websites.

4.  Friendlier default configuration. Now when you run Sync Gateway without providing any configuration options, the Guest user will be enabled and will have access to all documents. The tradeoff, for security reasons, is that Sync Gateway will default to listening on the local loopback interface only.

5.  Production certification for the next upcoming Couchbase 3.x release, and non-production certification for using 4.0 (Beta 1). Sync Gateway users are encouraged to upgrade to the next 3.x release as soon as possible in order to take advantage of all the great improvements since the 2.5.2 release.


Couchbase Lite for iOS

1. Pluggable storage engines. Couchbase Lite can now support multiple data persistance libraries. By default, it will continue to use SQLite.
2. [Experimental] Our new, super-fast ForestDB storage engine! Anyone who wants a preview of our future default storage engine can get started today by following these instructions for enabling the ForestDB storage engine.
3. Page-level database encryption via SQLCipher.
4. You can now query your database using NSPredicates thanks to CBLQueryBuilder, which provides an alternative to using map/reduce functions.
5. Our newly overhauled Core Data adapter, CBLIncrementalStore. Add sync to your Core Data applications by using Couchbase Lite as your backing store.
6. Improved replication and view indexing performance. Views are now stored more efficiently, which speeds up document indexing by roughly 10%.

Checkout the full list of API changes for more details.

Couchbase Lite for Android and Couchbase Lite for Java

Couchbase Lite for Android v1.1.0 focuses several new features and enhancements including:

1.     Improved replication and view indexing performance.

2.     Significant reduction in memory usage when processing many documents.

Couchbase Lite for .NET

1.      Self-hosted HTTP REST endpoint. The Couchbase Lite HttpListener now enables your apps to self host it's own REST API, providing a great way to serve data and files to HTTP clients and HTML/JavaScript apps, provide a mechanism for language interop, simple filesharing, or even interprocess communication.

2.     Peer-to-peer sync! With the introduction of Couchbase Lite's self-hosting capability, we've enabled two or more apps using Couchbase Lite to replicate with each other--without any other network infrastructure. We've also included support for the most popular way of discovering peers: Bonjour/DNS-SD.

3.     Support for Unity3D! Now you can bring the best mobile database to your Unity3D games.

4.     Overhauled the internal storage code which now implements the single-writer/multiple-reader pattern in order to achieve better peformance and stability.


Note: Couchbase Lite 1.1.0 has a new optimized database schema, your application’s .cblite database files are no longer readable by earlier versions. This would only impact developers attempting to share a database among multiple apps running different versions of Couchbase Lite, or Couchbase Lite downgrade scenarios.