14 DAY TRIAL // Developers who need to provide client-side data management for their Silverlight Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) now have Perst from McObject available. Perst is an open-source project designed to provide devs with an object-oriented embedded database system. Undoubtedly, some developers, especially those that extended Java (SE, ME, and EE), .NET, .NET Compact Framework and Mono applications with client-side data management capabilities, are already familiar with what McObject has to offer. According to David Chou, architect in the Developer & Platform Evangelism organization for Microsoft, McObjects also ported Perst to Silverlight recently.
“Its small library size (~1MB including support for generics; ~5,000 lines of code) and small in-memory footprint is packed with a very sophisticated set of features, such as: support for direct and transparent object persistence; full text search with indexing support; full-ACID transactions support SQL-based interface; XML import/export,” Chou explained.
According to Microsoft, Silverlight developers will be able to provide a lightweight in-memory embedded database for their apps. Because it is an open-source initiative, access is also permitted to the source code, allowing developers to contribute to the database system, fix bugs or extend its capabilities. At the end of the past week, Microsoft released the third version of Silverlight for the public.
“As an embedded database engine, Perst presents a very viable in-memory data management solution to Silverlight applications. It can be instantiated and used directly as part of the application, instead of something that runs in a separate process and memory space, or over the network on the back-end server for most RIA’s. Perst can also use Silverlight’s isolated storage to manage additional data that can be cached in a persistent manner. This enables many more complex scenarios than simply storing JSON, XML, CSV, or plain text data in isolated storage,” Chou added.
Silverlight 3 RTW (3.0.40624.0) is available for download here.