Forget about the Internet and Sync Locally

If you have missed our talk in Melbourne Mobile, now you have the chance to flip through the slides and have a look at the code/demo.

Talk Details

Cloud technologies have changed the way users interact with their devices and the way they keep their data. Users now expect their data to be synced always to all devices in real-time. This has been facilitated through many cloud providers such as iCloud, Google services, and Azure. Most of the current Sync models rely on having a server to facilitate data sync between devices. This requires having internet connectivity, transferring all the data to the server, and handling multiple aspects of the data security. This could be avoided by syncing the data locally. Most smartphones support Peer-to-Peer connections. This could be used to sync data and facilitate Sync in offline mode (when no internet connection is available), saving on data bandwidth, and keeping the data more secure as it does not need to go through the wire to the server. In this talk, I review the current state of Peer-to-Peer, why would we use it, how would we use it, and what could it be used for. I will also show a demo of the peer to peer connections and messaging in action on few smartphones.

The Slides

[slideshare id=38623452&doc=peer-to-peer-datasync-140902192327-phpapp02]

Demo Code

At this stage, the demo is very basic. It establishes a peer-to-peer connection between two mobile devices and send basic messages across (typical chat app). We are working on building a better framework that would facilitate cross-platform p2p sync with flexible conflict-resolution and robust sync mechanisms. The demo source could be found on GitHub.