Posts Tagged: Storage

A while ago I released IDBWrapper. If you don’t know it, it’s a wrapper for IndexedDB, a current specification (in draft status) for an in-browser object store. It’s implemented in Firefox and Chrome, and somehow (as a plugin of sorts) also in IE, but, honestly, I don’t care about that too much.

It is mainly meant to serve as an example implementation, so that you could have a look at the code and see how to work with IndexedDB. But I figured that people are also interested in actually using it, as it abstracts away many of the tedious internals of IndexedDB (like transactions) – and it is perfectly fine to use IDBWrapper for all non-overly-complex scenarios.

So here’s a tutorial about how to work with IDBWrapper and add a little background info about IndexedDB internals every now and then, instead of writing Yet-Another-Super-Technical-IDB-Blargh. Part one will cover some info about what IndexedDB is, getting IDBWrapper to run and how to read and write data to a store. Part two will be about querying the store.

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[Note: This is a cross-post. I also published this on the uxebu blog.]

As of version 1.6, dojo comes with the new Dojo Object Store API. This is an awesome thing, as it greatly simplifies the work with data stores in Dojo. Everybody who had to do with the traditional dojo.data API felt it was overly complex and hard to use – this has finally changed now. There are also wrappers from and to the old and new APIs, so that you can do stuff like using your traditional data-aware widgets with a new Object Store. And the goodness doesn’t end here; but more on this later. If you haven’t done so yet, you might want to read the excellent post on the new Dojo Object Stores by Kris Zyp where he explains all the awesomeness he created.

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[Note: This is a cross-post. I also published this on the uxebu blog.]

As Firefox 4 is now stable, chances are that the async IDB (IndexedDB) API is not going to change anymore. But IDB is not localStorage – it can be a major pain to work with. So, here is a guide on how to use IDB in Firefox as a key-value store.

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It’s been some time since I last updated this blog, mostly because there’s plenty going on these days. However, there’s something I’ve been wanting to publish for quite some time now: The results of the localStorage performance tests I ran several weeks ago. As I am currently working on performance tests for Mozilla’s IndexedDB implementation, which is available in latest Minefield releases, I got reminded that there are still other results to publish – so, here we go:

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– or: How to persist data in the 21st century.

The common way to persist data on the client side – application state, offline data, whatever –  still is to use cookies. But times have changed, and so have browsers, and there are better ways to do it today.

But why are cookies that bad? Well, here are the top three reasons:

1. Of all client side storage mechanisms, cookies have the worst limitation in size (4k if you want to stay IE-safe)
2. Cookies are sent to the server on every requests that matches the cookie domain – inlcuding XHR calls (aka. How to slow down your AJAX app)
3. Cookies perform bad, can be easily disabled, and, oh well, they are sooo 1995…

What else to use? There are several options, let’s start with the best:
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Last year, Brian Leroux‘s Lawnchair caught my interest – it is an easy and fast way to access local persistant local storage.

Uh, persistant local storage?

Ahm, yeah, in case you don’t know, that means a client-side storage, be it in a browser, or in an Air app. It’s not very popular, but that concept has been around for a long time. So why local? There are two major reasons for it: First, we need this for apps and tools that work offline – and apps and tools that work online but need an offline backup and sync later. Kris Zyp wrote a post about the JsonRestStore and OfflineRest back in 2008, he goes a little into detail there. Secondly, we need it for apps and tools that rely on persistence for other reasons, no matter if online or offline – like it happended to me. When I ran into Lawnchair, I had the idea to build a tool that was monitoring CSS selector usage on websites and apps (you know how you sometimes lose control about CSS selectors in webapps…). To achieve this, I needed to store data locally, and persistent.
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