Like a lot of long time Cocoa developers, I’ve long lamented the loss of EOF for doing database applications. CoreData is lame, too complicated and fiddly for document based development, too light weight for multi-user.
OTOH, EOF wasn’t perfect either. Having been doing Rails, I find I really like ActiveRecord. It strikes just the right balance between SQL and objects and I like its use of the database schema as the primary meta model.
So I was excited to learn about BaseTen. Right now it is PostgreSQL only, but that’s fine – I like PG. It allows for use of controllers and bindings like CoreData, but it is designed for multi-user use and it doesn’t have a separate model file – you just design the schema along with foreign key constraints and start using it. It really is kind of the best of all worlds. Bonus is it wires the database for notifications so applications stay in sync. In autocommit mode – all objects are hot sync’d. Usually this is exactly what you want for small business apps (think less than a dozen simultaneous users).
Definitely makes development of small business database backed apps easy.