Data is usually stored on a server in a database; in order to do that, our Dart app needs a middle layer called a database driver. We'll review which drivers are already available and then see how you can store and access your data on the server with MySQL and MongoDB. These are two of the most popular databases: MySQL is a typical relational database, and MongoDB is a NoSQL database (according to the following link, http://db-engines.com/en/ranking, MySQL is second in popularity after Oracle, and MongoDB occupies the sixth place). The following are the topics covered in this chapter:
- Database drivers for Dart
- Storing the
tododata in MySQL - Dartlero tasks: a many-to-many model in MySQL and JSON
- MongoDB: a NoSQL database
- Using the
mongo_dartdriver to store thetododata in MongoDB
The amazing Dart community has already provided a whole spectrum of drivers ((P) means published in the pub repository, pub.dartlang.org).
For the relational databases we have:
- MySQL: An actively developed connector called
SQLJocky(P) by James Ots; we will use this driver in the next section (https://github.com/jamesots/sqljocky) - PostgreSQL: A driver called
postgresql(P) by Greg Lowe (https://github.com/xxgreg/postgresql) - SQLite: A native extension library called
Dart-sqliteby Sam McCall (https://github.com/sam-mccall/dart-sqlite/) - ODBC-driver: A library called
dart-odbc(P) by Juan Mellado; this allows connections to any database vendor (Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLServer, and so on) with legacy ODBC drivers (http://code.google.com/p/dart-odbc/)
For the NoSQL databases, the choice is even greater:
- MongoDB: This is a driver called
mongo_dart(P) by Vadim Tsushko, Ted Sander, and Paul Evans; we'll use it in this chapter (https://github.com/vadimtsushko/mongo_dart). Another client by Vadim Tsushko is an object document mapper tool called Objectory, which can be used on the client as well as the server (https://github.com/vadimtsushko/objectory). - CouchDB: This is a driver called
couchclient(P) by Henri Chen. Another driver calledwilt(P) is created by S. Hamblett (https://github.com/shamblett/wilt). - Redis: This is a driver called
redis-dartby Adam Singer (https://github.com/financeCoding/redis-dart). Another Redis client calledDartRedisClient(P) is created by Dartist (https://github.com/dartist/redis_client). - Riak: This is a driver called
riak-dart(P) by Istvan Soos and Ian Jones (https://code.google.com/p/riak-dart/). - RethinkDB: This is a driver called
rethinkdb(P) by Dave Bettin (https://github.com/dbettin/rethinkdb). - HashMap: This is a driver called
dart-dirty(P) by Chris Strom, a dirt simple NoSQL DB that is a persistent, server-side HashMap (https://github.com/eee-c/dart-dirty).
There also exists an Object Relational Mapper (ORM) framework:
- Dorm: This framework is created by Frank Pepermans. It provides an ORM mapping on the client, and the goal is to hook it up with existing server-side ORM solutions (Hibernate, Entity Framework, and so on) (https://github.com/frankpepermans/dorm).