[aerogear-dev] Comparing sync in Android vs other platforms

For the DevNexus Android app[1] I used Android native sync APIs[2] + the sync strawman[3] I put out back in December. It worked surprisingly well with a few caveats. First a background on how Android sync works. Android sync is handled by three components: a SyncAdapter, a ContentProvider, and a Authenticator. The Sync Adapter performs as sync and returns a status object. The SyncAdapter is called from, managed by, etc the Android platform. It provides an onPerformSync that the developer implements. In the application the developer sends signals to Android which control scheduling sync (periodic, immediate, event based etc). Also Android will put in the "Account" settings page a control for the SyncAdapter. In this case the SQLSynchronizer I proposed was used to implement this method. The ContentProvider is responsible for CRUD operations on your data, exposing your data to other apps on the device, and notifying the system if data changes. This is managed by Android as well. In this case the CP was backed by a SQLStore. Finally the Android Authenticator is responsible for establishing and maintaining authentication with remote services. If the user is not signed in, or if fetching an auth token fails, the Authenticator will be called by Android to provide a Activity which can be used to refresh the users account. In this case I used two custom AuthenticationModules. One handled SSO with Google and the other handled keeping the cookie up to date. Both communicated with the DevNexus server to keep all of the tokens fresh. Overall, Android provides a very VERY slick (but very very complicated) way of managing sync AND keeping the sync state visible to the user. If you use Androids APIs then the OS handles things like Authentication errors, intermittent connectivity, etc while providing configuration for a variety of sync use cases (UI event based, polling, data listening, etc). I tried looking up what options are available in JS land but the closest I came to was a FFOS blurb about it is a TODO item and isn't a W3C proposal or anything yet. I tried looking at iOS but the docs made my eyes cross. So what does the PLATFORM support look like in these environments? ---- [1]https://github.com/secondsun/devnexusAndroid [2]http://developer.android.com/training/sync-adapters/index.html [3]https://github.com/secondsun/aerogear-android/tree/sync_strawman/src/or...