I am trying to write an application that will access, and change, entries in a user’s calendars. The changes are driven by fairly complex rules, that the user can define.
My question, before I spend too much time developing, is whether I should go with core data. A lot of the model will be handled by core data, but I will need to access a lot of stored info and then change it. Would this be a problem with core data?
It would help if I had a better understanding of core data, but at this point I do not 🙁 Could someone comment on the possibility to perform changes on the model data, when using core data? I’d hate to be a few months into the development, and discover I made the wrong choice!
The recently released WWDC media collection contains an audio presentation from 2005 when the Core Data framework was released as part of the OS X frameworks. The presentation covers Core Data’s primary goals, design principles and architecture. It also discusses a set of sample applications (the recipy apps). The collection is available through iTunesU. It is worthwhile to listen to to grasp the framework’s working principles.
I’ve been working with Core Data for a while now. I find it easy to work with, well integrated into Xcode, stable and so far has been a true contributor to my productivity. It offers various storage options for your data (binary, XML – very easy to work with during development – and SQLite), very decent tool support, easy model migration for small changes, complex migration available for major model changes with some extra effort.
You will have to be aware of the fact that Core Data is NOT a RDBMS nor a RDBMS mapping tool. It is an object graph and persistence framework, which is a different thing. If you ignore this fact, Core Data might give you performance penalties.