I’m making a word game on iOS, and I’ve assembled a very large (thousands) number of individual plist files, each containing a long word, and all the smaller words that can be formed from some of its letters (so just lots and lots of strings).
Such a large number of files is making Xcode rather slow, and is presumably very inefficient anyway. Only one of the files is actually loaded into memory at a time in the game, but I’d much prefer a better way to store all these individual files, some kind of container (even 26 of them, one each for A-Z would be better) that I can dip into to grab one of them out at random (which is what I do now).
Preferably something that won’t be a huge deal to convert the existing files I have, too.
Any ideas of technologies I can look at to achieve this? I’d rather not get into Core Data yet, I’m still fairly new to programming in general and frankly it seems above me at present. Thanks in advance!
I think in your case, JSON can be preferred container to save all that data. It has the minimal overhead as compared to XML. Plus it’ll be easy to translate JSON into Entities.
But best would be SQLite, you can store that data in SQLite as retrieving (specially random retrieval will be just a Query away) will become much easier.