On switching away from CoreData

Like Brent Simmons, I have a project where I am currently in the process of switching away from CoreData. Unlike Brent, and somewhat surprisingly given my proclivities, the reason is not performance.

Rather, the issues we have had with CoreData were additional complexity and more importantly gratuitous dependencies that, at least for our application, were not offset by noticeable benefits.

One of the most significant structural dependencies is that CoreData requires all your model classes to be subclasses of NSManagedObject, a class provided by CoreData. This may not seem like a big problem at first, but it gets in the way of defining a proper DomainModel, which should always be independent. The Java community actually figured this out a while ago, which is why there was a recent move to persistence frameworks supporting POJOs. (Of course, POOO doesn't have quite the same ring to it, and also the Java frameworks were a lot more heavy-handed than CoreData). The model is where your value is, it should be unencumbered. For example, when we started looking at the iPhone, there was no CoreData there, so we faced the prospect of duplicating all our model code.

In addition to initially not having CoreData, the iPhone app also used (and still uses) a completely different persistence mechanism (more feed oriented), and there were other applications where yet a third persistence mechanism was used (more document centric than DB-centric, with an externally defined file format). A proper class hierarchy would have had an abstract superclass without any reference to a specific persistence mechanism, but capturing the domain knowledge of our model. With CoreData, this hierarchy was impossible.

Since we had externally defined file formats in every case, we had to write an Atomic Store adapter and thus also couldn't really benefit from CoreData's change management. When we did the move, it turned out that the Atomic Store adapter we had written was significantly more code than just serializing and de-serializing the XML ourselves.

Another benefit of CoreData is its integration with Bindings, but that also turned out to be of little use to us. The code we managed to save with Bindings was small and trivial, whereas the time and effort to debug bindings when they went wrong or to customize them for slightly specialized needs was very, very large. So we actually ditched Bindings a long time before we got rid of CoreData.

So why was CoreData chosen in the first place? Since I wasn't around for that decision, I don't know 100%, but as far as I can tell it was mostly "Shiny Object Syndrome". CoreData and Bindings were new Apple technologies at the time, therefore they had to be used.

So are there any lessons here? The first would be to avoid Shiny Object Syndrome. By all means have fun and play around, but not in production code. Second and related is to really examine your needs. CoreData is probably highly appropriate in many contexts, it just wasn't in ours. Finally, it would be a huge improvement if CoreData were to support Plain Old Objective-C Objects. In fact, if that were the case we probably would not have to ditch it.