Key Web App Standard Approaches Consensus

suraj.sun tips a report up at CNet which begins: "Browser makers, grappling with outmoded technology and a vision to rebuild the Web as a foundation for applications, have begun converging on a seemingly basic but very important element of cloud computing. That ability is called local storage, and the new mechanism is called Indexed DB. Indexed DB, proposed by Oracle and initially called WebSimpleDB, is largely just a prototype at this stage, not something Web programmers can use yet. But already it's won endorsements from Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google, and together, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome account for more than 90 percent of the usage on the Net today. 'Indexed DB is interesting to both Firefox and Microsoft, so if we get to the point where we prototype it and want to ship it, it will have very wide availability,' said Chris Blizzard, director of evangelism for Mozilla. ... Microsoft publicly endorsed Indexed DB on its IE blog: 'Together with Mozilla, we're excited about a new design for local storage called Indexed DB. We think this is a great solution for the Web,' said program manager Adrian Bateman."

Comments

Re:Slowly reinventing the wheel in the browser

[raddan]

I think your comment is spot-on, and I think the reason is this: programmers hate network programming. They hate concurrency. CODER WANT SIMPLE.

When you look at much of the development of platforms, a great deal of effort has been expended to make sure that the programming model is simple. E.g., from the perspective of a typical process running in a typical modern OS, the world still looks like a simple OS: your own flat address space and simple system calls to use to write to disk, etc. Generally, you don't have to deal with interrupts, shared memory, etc. But networking is where all of this breaks down. The location of your storage is important, because while hard disks are slow, network storage is really slow. Some parts of your application run here, and some run there, and here and there may even be wildly different platforms (e.g., 'there' could be a functional language running on a cluster, while 'here' could be a mobile web browser on a cellphone), so race conditions and slow network links and processors are a real problem.

This constant shifting around is an attempt to find the right complexity balance. I don't know if there is a 'right' balance for all scenarios, but it doesn't look like that's going to stop people from trying to find it. Just look at all the iterations of RPC out there. They all suck, too (you just can't pretend the network doesn't exist!), but that does not stop them from being useful. Just look at NFS.