ubuntu-touch-coreapps team mailing list archive

[Nekhelesh Ramananthan <krnekhelesh@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello everyone,

This email is concerning persistent storage options for an Ubuntu Touch
application developer. I hope this doesn't turn out to be a big email, but
in any case here is a short summary of this email. What is the future of
U1dB-Qt? Currently the documentation and tutorials for using U1dB is quite
limited and lacking in several area. Would it be possible to engage with
the original U1dB-Qt developers to improve this?

Here is the long version, Currently there are two options for persistent
storage in use which are *U1dB *and *Qt LocalStorage*. I believe that core
applications currently make use of Qt LocalStorage extensively. However it
has its limitations which are the inability to sync data across devices and
its rather messy syntax involving sqlite database. U1dB-Qt on the other
hand was built from ground up to provide a simpler declarative syntax like
QML and has sync capabilities which makes it a compelling option. However
one of the areas that U1dB suffers from is documentation and tutorials. It
is rather quite surprising how some of the Ubuntu App Developer 2013
contestants managed to use it in their applications. I did find some links
to U1dB-Qt resources [1],[2],[3] which help a little but is still missing a
big chunk of features. Can we expect U1dB-Qt to be actively encouraged in
the future for persistent storage?

If I may, I like to make a proposal to use this email thread to engage with
the original/current U1dB-Qt developers to improve the documentation to a
point where new developers can comfortably use it in their applications.
Please do note that, I am not looking to just assign work items to others
and see where it goes. I am personally willing to be involved to work
(document) on this project. However I am no U1dB expert which is why I need
the U1dB developers help. If you think this is feasible please let me know
and I will get started with a blueprint to keep track of the work needed
and engage with the community. As always any help is welcome. @Michael
Hall, Stuart Langridge are some obvious candidates that I can think of at
the moment :-).

Some tasks that come from the top of my head are,
1. Integrate documentation into developer.ubuntu.com
2. Have some basic tutorials showing how to create U1dB documents to store
basic data, retrieving stored data and deleting data

[1]: http://people.ubuntu.com/~mhall119/u1db-qt/u1db-qt-cheatsheet.html
[2]:
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~uonedb-qt/u1db-qt/trunk/files/head:/examples/
[3]:
http://wordchainapp.tumblr.com/post/60178716314/using-u1db-to-store-data-in-word-chain

Cheers,
Nekhelesh