Post your questions for the Realm AMA on July 16th, 2020 (EST)

From noon (4pm UTC ) until 1:30pm U.S. Eastern Time (5:30pm UTC). on Thursday, July 16, we’ll be hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the MongoDB Realm team. Join us for a 90 minute Twitch session hosted by @JoeKarlsson as we answer your questions live at Twitch.

We’d love to have some of your questions in advance so we can come prepared with as many details as possible. Please post them below as a comment on this thread. And, after the Twitch stream is done, we’ll continue to answer your questions in real time here until 5PM ET (9PM UTC) on Thursday.

Chat with you soon!

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When is EST? Is that an American time zone? When is it UTC?

Hello @John_Nicolson welcome to the community and thanks for the question!

The EST Zone encompasses all the eastern US states and many more other countries on the same north-south axis. New York, where MongoDB’s headquarter is, is also part of the EST zone. EST is -5 to UTC. BUT only some locations are currently on EST because most places in this time zone are currently on summer time / daylight saving time and are observing EDT. EDT is -4 to UTC. So I would assume that the event ends at 21:00 UTC, hope @Jamie can confirm.

Cheers,
Michael
(CET with daylight saving, so UTC +2)

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Hi @John_Nicolson,

The date & time reference is for US Eastern Time (currently GMT-4 as pointed out by @michael_hoeller).

The Twitch stream will be live from noon ET (4pm UTC ) through to 1:30pm ET (5:30pm UTC).

After the Twitch stream wraps up, additional Realm questions will be answered in real time on the forum until 5pm ET (9pm UTC).

Regards,
Stennie

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Hi @John_Nicolson, my apologies for the confusion in the initial post. @michael_hoeller and @Stennie_X are on point with their responses.

Cheers,

Jamie

Will we ever get again an option to host our own realm server for free? For example for hobby projects?

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when is realm coming for flutter ?

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No worries Jamie. I appreciate you used the full month July. Non-Americans are often confused by the middle-endian date format used in the US :grinning:

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I’d like to see some light thrown on the roadmap for the DotNET SDK. We’re an ISV headquartered in Europe. We have desktop business products, one of which we ported to Realm Cloud as an early adopter a couple of years ago.

The DotNET SDK had some rough edges and was not as feature complete as the Swift SDK. That’s not an issue if the DotNET SDK continues to move forward as we are happy for others to blaze the trail.

However the DotNET SDK seems to have stagnated. We are told the MongoDB Realm DotNET SDK is coming, coming , coming …

We also note with concern that MongoDB Realm docs, not only omit DotNET but conspicuously ignore desktop development.

The app we ported to Realm Cloud is offered to our customers as Preview software. Our customers like it. Realm ticks lots of boxes for them so we would like to push on.

Is there a reliable timetable for the MongoDB Realm DotNET SDK?

Is the DotNET SDK adequately resourced to meet the timetable?

What is the MongoDB vision for Realm on the desktop?

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A few questions:

  1. What is the future of the local Realm database, does the mongodb aquisition mean everything will be focused on sync now?

  2. A recent survey sent to me from mongodb had the question “how sad would you be if Realm was discontinued” giving me the impression that mongodb may kill the realm project at some point. Would the database remain open source if this happened?

  3. There doesn’t currently seem to be an official place to file bug reports, I asked in the support chat and was told to upgrade to a paid support plan in order to file bugs, can we still report these on the respective realm github repos? - Edit: managed to report on github so that works for me.

  4. Would you consider making a Kotlin Native / Multiplatform port of Realm? perhaps making realm-java compatible?

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Here’s my question, which I already got a response from the Realm team on, but bear with me!

“When following the tutorial, it says for React Native to use Sync but for Web to use GraphQL. So for each one the way permissions are handled is different, and the way data is sent across the wire is also different. So does this mean that we would need to create 2 Realm Apps to support both mobile and web users? (which seems therefore that users would exist in both apps - but not be able to see data created in one app, since the user_ids will not be the same)?”

The answer was:
“GraphQL and Sync are both services that you can use with one Realm App. The way to define permissions for both are slightly different at the moment, but you are not required to create two applications if you want to share the same users across Web and mobile.”

This answer is conflicting - it says you can use one App, but permissions don’t work the same ‘at the moment’. It’s not clear at all.

In the Realm settings, if you ENABLE Realm Sync, then the permissions you set in the RULES section do not apply. Surely that means GraphQL queries will fail?

So does the ‘at the moment’ mean it’s not possible yet? Or is it actually possible, today, to setup users in one Realm App and have the permissions work from React Native client using Sync and a Web client using GraphQL?

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I recently went through the Realm tutorial “Create a Task Tracker App” specifically focused on building a Web Application. The web instructions have you use TypeScript, React, GraphQL, and Apollo. As a new developer, this was a lot to process.

After reading through the docs I realized you can just use Realm and a provided Web SDK. I also noticed that the docs have a heavy emphasis on using GraphQL, which recommends using Apollo, which is heavily focused on React.

Is this “tech stack” the recommended way to go with Realm?
Can other solutions work well like Realm, the Web SDK, and Angular/Vue?
It would be nice if there were more tutorials that built up to such a dense application.

I hope the AMA goes well!

-Jake

Hi Nils – It’s something that we’re looking into, likely first for the development/testing purposes. It doesn’t looks like there’s a request tracking this on our feedback forum but if you’d like to add something then we’ll track/update on our end.

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Hi – We’re actively looking into how we can support Flutter and work around some limitations within Dart. There is a Github Issue tracking this as well as a post on our feedback forum.

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Hi @Nosl_O_Cinnhoj – We’re hoping to release a new version of the .NET SDK that takes advantage of new Realm Database features and incorporates new Sync in the near future. We’re actually looking to scale up our .NET team to help this happen more quickly – so if you know anyone who might be interested feel free to point them to this job.

Hi @Theo_Miles – Great questions!

  1. We’re actually splitting work pretty evenly across the Realm Database and new Cloud/Sync features. On the Realm Database side we’re going to be focused on adding new data types that make modeling more flexible, expanding supported use cases for Realm Database, and addressing some long standing usability feedback.
  2. This is a good point – the question is a common question to measure if we built something that people fine useful but it probably sends the wrong message. We’re not thinking about stopping Sync so we removed the question.
  3. Github and these forums are great places to raise issues if you don’t have a support plan.
  4. We’re actively looking into this but I don’t have a set timeline for release yet.

Hi @Richard_McSharry – Good follow-up question! You should be able to use a single application. If you start using Sync then the permissions you set-up in Sync will also apply to other requests. We can definitely look into clarifying this. Separately, we’re working on merging all the permissions together in the future.

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Hi Jake – This is a a great point. While we started with a Web tutorial that combined these technologies you should be able to use the GraphQL service or the Realm Web SDK with different frameworks. We’re looking to expand the number of tutorials/examples we have in the future!

Thanks for taking the time to answer @Drew_DiPalma !

Are there any demo repos anywhere that I can look at that uses Realm Sync, GraphQL and both a React Native and Web App using a single Realm App?