Probably a good thing. The most complex part of Web SQL amounted to "Whatever SQLite implements", neither Mozilla nor Microsoft supported it making the standard effectively irrelevent, and I remain thoroughly unconvinced that providing an extremely thin JavaScript API to an SQL-driven database is an elegant solution to this particular problem.
Presumably the W3C have decided to favour IndexedDB instead, which solves many of the same problems in a much more elegant, simple and well-specified fashion.
No, it sucks. Having Client side relational storage in a client side web app is a very powerful thing.
Having this on disconnected devices is a very common use case. These types of applications has been written in crummy VB6 or .NET code for a long time on handheld devices, etc. I guess they will continue to be written in it then.
Key/value stores and key/value stores with ponies and rainbows (NoSQL) is not a sufficently general solution to replace the relational model.
I'm disappointed by the vendor war attitude in this thread. Why don't Mozilla or MS support WebSQL? Do they have some objection to it or have they just not gotten around to implementing it yet?
The most complex part of Web SQL effectively amounted to "Whatever SQLite implemented"
Which is one of the most tested, most utilized, most known pieces of code used among modern software. Saying "reference it" is entirely rational. And really the ludicrous notion that documenting its behaviors is unfathomably difficult is so asinine that it demolishes that line of argument.
neither Mozilla nor Microsoft supported it
Microsoft doesn't REALLY support either: Does IE9 have IndexedDB? Not that I'm aware of.
Microsoft's angle regarding Web Databases was nothing more than "I don't know...that looks mighty uppity for a web app..."
Mozilla is taking a very myopic, "high-road" approach that is similar to, and less justifiable, the whole h.264 debacle: Everyone loses, but someone gets to hold their head up high.
Further, Chrome, Safari, Opera, other...none of them support IndexedDB, so as a standard it is effectively irrelevant.
Presumably the W3C have decided to favour IndexedDB instead, which solves many of the same problems in a much more elegant, simple and well-specified fashion.
Ha ha ha!
The IndexedDB spec right now has incredible gaps that make it close to useless. The braintrust at Mozilla that are responsible for it can't stop themselves from saying "CouchDB" long enough to actually work on it, it seems.
I think they got caught up in the whole NoSQL thing. So much so that they now seriously advocate that libraries should pop up inefficiently implementing SQL on top of IndexedDB, which is just saddening.
The truth is the reason they pointed to SQLite is because the proposed API was so obscenely complicated that it was easier to point to a reference implementation than to accurately specify a standard, which points to a rather fundamental problem with the proposed standard: SQL is too damn complicated, and embedding it in browsers is a bad idea.
For a web standard to succeed, you need either Mozilla or Microsoft support, preferably both. They have 75% of the browser market between them, so without either any standard is dead on arrival. Chrome, Safari and Opera individually do not have enough marketshare to be a significant influence on the takeup of web standards and still follow in the footsteps of the others. Incidentally, Chrome does support IndexedDB (http://peter.sh/2010/10/indexeddb-milestone-8-es5-strict-mod...).
Mozilla have made it clear they are supporting IndexedDB and not WebSQL. Microsoft have publicly posted remarks of support of IndexedDB on the IE blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/03/09/working-with-t...) and Pablo Castro, an architect involved with web standards has publicly favoured IndexedDB over WebSQL (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/pablo/archive/2010/01/04/html5-does-...). It's not always easy to judge the inner workings of Microsoft, but I think it's a pretty strong hint as to what they are working on.
The IndexedDB spec seems relatively well-specified to me, and much more detailed than the WebSQL spec. Incidentally, the original authorship of WebSimpleDB was Nikunj Mehta, who was an Oracle employee at the time. The standard didn't originally come from any "braintrust at Mozilla".
> For a web standard to succeed, you need either Mozilla or Microsoft support, preferably both. They have 75% of the browser market between them, so without either any standard is dead on arrival
I don't get it. If IE6 can be kept afloat by enterprise web apps that weren't designed for anything else, why can't there be web apps with offline features that only work with Chrome and Safari?
Mozilla is taking a very myopic, "high-road" approach that is similar to, and less justifiable, the whole h.264 debacle: Everyone loses, but someone gets to hold their head up high.
It'd be nice if you'd, you know, qualify this or something.
Why not just use SQLite? Write a small wrapper around it to isolate each website off on it's own database or set of databases. Each site corresponds to a SQLite user with a password that ONLY the browser knows.
Because if everyone used SQLite there would be no second implementation, which is something that is necessary for a proposed standard to become an actual standard.
I believe you, especially as it makes a number of lines I've heard around this make more sense... but why? Especially in this case, where there is a standard and it's already been implemented by several? Is it just pedantry because they don't get to call the shots?
It has one implementation implemented identically in more than one browser. SQLite. Which is a standard with an implementation to compare against.
Anyway.
Yes, there is only one implementation, one standard, one non-W3C-spec. Why does it matter to them that there's no competing spec, when they could just support something that is already out there, and can be solved by pointing to http://www.sqlite.org/docs.html ? The API for accessing it is mindlessly simple and small, documenting that would take a day at worst.
It seems they're trying to run it into the ground because they don't control it, because it didn't go through their proper procedure, whereby it must have a competitor.
Why? In what way is this helpful? And if they're not being helpful, what's their purpose? To be dogmatic and prevent good ideas they didn't come up with from spreading?
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edit:
>The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. Led by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and CEO Jeffrey Jaffe, W3C's mission is to lead the Web to its full potential. Contact W3C for more information. (from http://www.w3.org/Consortium/)
How does trying to prevent it aid in "lead[ing] the Web to its full potential"?
Why does it matter to them that there's no competing spec
Because ALL web standards are standards only because of the fact that there are MULTIPLE implementations. This is a basic principle behind the Web, and making even a single exception leads to a dangerous slippery slope.
It seems they're trying to run it into the ground because they don't control it
No.
because it didn't go through their proper procedure, whereby it must have a competitor.
Yes. In the long term, not having another implementation is a dangerous sign -- it is a sign that developers are incapable of coming up with another implementation. What if SQLite can't be ported to some hypothetical architecture/stack in the future -- for example, a fully managed OS? What is the guarantee that someone will be able to come up with another implementation of the same spec which can run on that OS? At least with multiple implementations you know that the problem is tractable.
Why? In what way is this helpful?
It is helpful because it demonstrates long-term thinking.
And if they're not being helpful, what's their purpose? To be dogmatic and prevent good ideas they didn't come up with from spreading?
And the multiple implementations of IndexedDB are...? (don't actually know. If you do, I'd be interested in links)
There's an early one in Firefox 4 beta right now [1], and an upcoming one in Chrome [2]. Microsoft will probably implement IndexedDB in a future version of IE [3]. (IndexedDB isn't a standard right now either, but it'll be on track to be one once two implementations are complete.)
I don't think any browser shares all the peculiarities of any other browser. That's hardly an argument against there being a W3C spec for HTML, CSS, the DOM, or JavaScript. Why pick on SQL?
By "peculiarities" I didn't mean minor implementation differences but the major ideas behind the implementation. Be reasonable here -- the differences in implementation in the DOM between Gecko and WebKit (say) are trivial compared to "type checking" vs "lack of type checking". There's a bit of subjectivity involved, agreed, but I think any reasonable person would agree about the differences.
There are indeed differences. Much greater with SQLite vs (most) other SQL engines.
I still see it as killing something out of some ulterior motive rather than supporting something highly effective. SQLite exists because it has survived against many competitors for a long time. It's not like this is some new, untested thing that cropped up out of nowhere.
edit: just realized there's a much stronger argument here. And a bigger threat.
By not supporting WebDatabase, because the implementers all used SQLite, they've essentially guaranteed that they will never support an SQL-based database. Few are going to want to compete with SQLite on its own turf as an embedded database when it's already so optimized. Especially if they all have to agree on a spec similar to SQLite.
SQLite isn't even all that poor of a match for a JS-interfaced database. JS is nearly as fast and loose with its types as SQLite, and the types that do exist are very close to what JS has.
You still haven't answered what you're going to do if the current SQLite code simply can't run on a particular OS stack. There's no guarantee that every future stack will have a C compiler, or even allow C programs.
All that matters is the behavior, which SQLite has very well defined because it's a bit wonky out of maintaining backwards compatibility. Even the fundamental algorithms will still translate, so all that's needed is to compile it or something logically similar for the system with whatever compiler it allows. Heck, it'd probably be easier than implementing off an abstract spec, especially when you consider most of the optimizations will still translate but do not need to be discovered.
If such a system exists, it won't be able to run the vast majority of stuff out there. Re-implementing SQLite will be the least of its concerns.
Well, I think having two implementations is necessary for a "standard" to actually truly be one, because if there's just one then you might as well be standardizing on the implementation rather than on the spec. I don't agree with standardizing on implementations in principle.
Hardly. An API can exist entirely without implementation, and pulling an API from an implementation doesn't need to expose any details of the implementation. That's kind of the point of an API - it's an abstraction. And what are the specs, if not APIs?
Not standardizing on an implementation: makes sense. Refusing to standardize on an API until there are two+ implementations: ?
Refusing to standardize on an API until there are two+ implementations: ?
There are good reasons for this, like uncovering undocumented-but-essential behavior. I think if you are going to standardize an API you should have two implementations, but I also think it's reasonable to standardize a single implementation as long as it is licensed so that everyone can use it (e.g. SQLite).
The most complex part of Web SQL effectively amounted to "Whatever SQLite implemented"
Which is one of the most tested, most utilized, most known pieces of code used among modern software. Saying "reference it" is entirely rational. And really the ludicrous notion that documenting its behaviors is unfathomably difficult is so asinine that it demolishes that line of argument
The proposal wasn't to standardize on the SQLite implementation, it was to reverse engineer it and write a standards document from its behavior.
No one (including the maintainers of the Webkit-based implementations that had WebSQL) thought that was a good idea, but there weren't any good other proposals. Unlike WebSQL, IndexDB does have consensus amongst browser vendors. Microsoft haven't implemented it in IE9 yet, but are planning to support it [1]. IE9 does already support HTML5 localStorage, which is closely related to IndexDB (that close relationship is one of the reasons why IndexDB makes more sense to me that WebSQL)
As far as the NoSQL thing is concerned, I think it's interesting to note that IndexDB's semantics closely match those of BerkeleyDB, which started life in 1991. Work first started on IndexDB in 2006 [2], long before the term NoSQL was invented.
tldr; The SQLite software was never going to be the standard, rather one would be reverse engineered from it, and IndexDB predated (by far) the current trend towards "NoSQL" databases.
"As far as the NoSQL thing is concerned, I think it's interesting to note that IndexDB's semantics closely match those of BerkeleyDB, which started life in 1991. Work first started on IndexDB in 2006 [2], long before the term NoSQL was invented."
I don't think anyone believes that NoSQL is a new concept, regardless of the lineage of the current name (just as "AJAX" existed years before someone called it AJAX).
>I think they got caught up in the whole NoSQL thing.
I was hesitating saying something to that effect in my comment, but seeing as someone else has broken the ice, what the hell:
This whole IndexedDB push by Mozilla has seemed a side-effect of the SQL/NoSQL hubbub, and not much else. There's legitimate use for IndexedDB, and it does a couple things better than WebDatabases do, and it's closer to writing JavaScript... but there's almost no reason to not implement WebDatabase by dropping an SQLite engine into your system. And why the hell couldn't they have picked something that already exists to a certain degree, rather than making everyone start from scratch in optimizations?
edit: to go a step further:
>Implementors should be aware that this specification is not stable. Implementors who are not taking part in the discussions are likely to find the specification changing out from under them in incompatible ways.
They sound kinda like they're complaining about all this, in a "you'll see! You'll all see!" sort of way. I think it's a power-struggle thing; there's a standard on the web they don't and can't control, because everyone went ahead and agreed on something without them while they were busy making it way more opaque and complicated than it is / needs to be.
Because there is only one implementation, no matter how good it is, websites would end up relying on every bug and quirk in SQLite.
SQLite isn't quite SQL. It has weakly dynamically typed columns (will happily store strings in INT column), and ROWID/auto increment is icky (magic behavior with special-casing for backwards compatibility).
Which is one of the most tested, most utilized, most known pieces of code used among modern software.
Sounds like Microsoft Windows to me :)
I think that SQLite is a really nice database. But just because SQLite would work in the browser, doesn't mean W3C shouldn't try to do something better.
>This document was on the W3C Recommendation track but specification work has stopped. The specification reached an impasse: all interested implementors have used the same SQL backend (Sqlite), but we need multiple independent implementations to proceed along a standardisation path.
That notice has been up for quite a while now. They're just making it plainer that they've given up, because there's already a spec out there that they don't have control of.
Also, to perform a join in IndexedDB, you've gotta do it by hand, iterating over the results and merging data programmatically[1]. While WebDatabases have a PITA async-only API for reasons which are entirely beyond my comprehension, SQL is an incredibly capable language for interacting with a database, and has very mature and efficient implementations. Losing that would count as a massive loss to me. Why can't we have both? WebKit / Chrome is already going this route, as they have WebDatabase and recently implemented IndexedDB as well.
While WebDatabases have a PITA async-only API for reasons which are entirely beyond my comprehension
That's because they want to support responsive applications. Javascript doesn't really have native concurrency operations, so the best (only?) way to do it is via async operations.
It's like XMLHttpRequest: Async only, which can be harder to program, but makes it a lot more robust.
Worker<->UI communication is asynchronous, and has additional limitations (only copying, only JSON-able data), so synchronous worker API in many cases would just shift complexity elsewhere.
In part. It makes conditional, nested queries much simpler, however, when you don't need to nest async callbacks 20 layers deep.
I understand that having a synchronous API would mean more people would use it. But honestly, I see that as their problem. A fair number of queries, such as "select * from your_table where id = ?", are useful to have synchronous as an option, and should perform quickly enough to be invisible. And synchronous can easily be made asynchronous, but the other way around is essentially impossible without any Thread.join.
The W3C didn't kill it, it was Mozilla and Microsoft who decided they didn't want to implement it (for a variety of reasonable reasons) and me who decided to not continue working on a spec that didn't have all the browser vendors on board.
No one has mentioned yet that both Android and iPhone implemented SQLite as described in the draft spec. There's a tremendous number of developers -- including myself -- who have built apps against it. The described spec may not become commonplace in desktop browsers, but it's an entirely different story on advanced mobile devices where Mozilla / Microsoft have nearly zero influence.
I definitely don't see this just suddenly evaporating or going unmaintained in those platforms.
It is a replacement, but I'm not really sure whether it's a good one. SQL was a nice choice because it made writing hybrid applications (with online and offline DB storage) very easy, and it was using an API that was already well known and understood. At this point it's unclear if IndexedDB is actually going anywhere, it's a prime example of a lifeless spec being prescribed from "high above". It might get adopted, maybe browser makers will force web devs to do it in the end, but SQL already has been proven more than workable in the field whereas IndexedDB has not.
SQL is certainly a well-known _language_, but I don't think it's very well understood by most.
Also if IndexedDB has a "lifeless" spec, it might be because there's not much to discuss. Something simple and straightforward tends to requires much less discussion and debate, than something complex.
I'll be obtuse, and claim it means "JavaScript-like". You know, multiple "truthy" values, the inability to detect the difference between arrays and objects, a weird mashup of OO and functional abilities, `=== undefined` but `isNaN()`, and no real difference between integers and floats, and all the math weirdness that goes with them. Browsers implementing the same thing different ways, interacting with a system (the DOM) that's the same but different everywhere, and patched together by multiple, usually-mutually-exclusive libraries that everyone uses instead of the actual language.
(disclaimer: I've come to quite like JS, it's made some of my experiments phenomenally simple. but it's weird.)
An API that maps to the underlying data-structure (btree, ranges, cursors), is bar-none simpler than an API that abtracts the underlying data structure away (like any SQL does).
The web was built by taking existing systems, and cutting away at them until they were so simple they barely worked. But because they were simple they could spread.
IndexedDB isn't the simplest spec it could be (I think they could do-away with transactions if they were willing to require MVCC semantics) but it is admirably simple for a database.
> An API that maps to the underlying data-structure (btree, ranges, cursors), is bar-none simpler than an API that abtracts the underlying data structure away (like any SQL does).
That may be true in this specific case (I'm not saying either way), but it does not hold generally. For example, APIs involving directories and files are simpler than APIs involving inodes and blocks.
They should have just agreed on a simple subset of SQL instead of going NoSQL, but apparently that wasn't good enough for them, waiting a decade more for something to store data in is probably better.
I personally love the concept of NoSQL, it's just that IndexedDB needs a few more years, which means it will probably even miss IE10.
I suppose I'm just jumpy because of the lack of granularity in user control over local storage, and wary of the eptitude of the browser vendors, and in favor of fewer, smaller features. After reading the inept IndexedDB thing, however, it seems like the wrong local storage mechanism is going to get it in the neck.
You've got just as much control. Grab the console and 'drop table' - all that data, gone. You can even trash all the databases in most browsers pretty simply. And restrict their size. The difference is that client-side JavaScript becomes useful with a large-ish local storage.
Arguably, it's significantly safer than cookies, which are sent with every request (ie: Firesheep).
The issue would largely be storing sensitive data (I presume), namely personally identifiable information. Imagine all the user data being stored in a simple and quick API that advertisers (et al) can grab at, rather than having to scrape through HTML bits on a page. Now imagine malware spreading across the internet and frictionlessly gathering this data.
Although some might argue we're already there and that there's nothing stopping the deluge of user information.
XSS and SOP disasters. Basically, everything that was broken about the web before, but more broken-y now. This of course applies to HTML5 local storage, too.
I think that's a great news. HTML5 adds lots of complexity in the browser, and yet don't address most of the fundamental problems of HTML: security, complexity. Web SQL was another step in the wrong direction.
Local storage wont go away. I hope Web SQL will be replaced by something "better" and more straightforward, A simple key-value database would be great.
No, in fact I'm mighty upset about this and have been for some time, mainly cos the damn thing isn't vaporware. It exists in Safari and Chrome, whereas IndexedDB works nowhere yet but "sounds neat."
I want to see what WebKit browsers are going to do. I use this in a couple of small HTML5 offline apps.
Yeah, me too. I think it's just politics, in the best traditions of big corporations, that doesn't do any good to actual web developers.
From practical perspective we would be better off with Web SQL DB. Functionally it addresses everything a developer needs to create offline HTML apps. API is not perfect but you can always improve that with small wrapper libraries (like JQuery improves DOM API). You can always easily implement IndexDB-like API on top off SQL if you really want that. The opposite is probably possible but much more difficult.
Also I think IndexDB might turn out to be yet another compatibility headache because everybody will be creating their own implementation (I'm pretty sure there will be at least 3 - Microsoft, Mozilla & Webkit). It's a speculation but most likely this wouldn't be an issue with Web SQL DB because everybody would just use the same SQLLite backend.
And worst of all, this is delaying progress of web applications. Lack of solid cross-browser client-side storage solution is the last big gap for next generation of web applications. If everybody had just agreed on SQLLite we could be there today... now it's still unknown when we will get there.
Also I think IndexDB might turn out to be yet another compatibility headache because everybody will be creating their own implementation (I'm pretty sure there will be at least 3 - Microsoft, Mozilla & Webkit). It's a speculation but most likely this wouldn't be an issue with Web SQL DB because everybody would just use the same SQLLite backend.
For a proposed web standard to become an actual web standard there need to be at least two implementations. This is a good, healthy thing. There was going to be no second implementation of Web SQL, so it was never going to become a standard.
Well it's annoying that I've just finished coding a fairly complicated class this week which relies solely on Web SQL!
Thankfully the app (a touchscreen kiosk which you'll see in a few museums in London) runs only in Chrome, so it'll be fine for as long as it's supported there.
I am sad only to extend that there is some juice in SQL that the SQL people where unable to inject into JavaScript, either because of lazyness or more probably because they will never compromise at the syntax level when times come to reduce the impedance mismatch between two different language syntaxes.
Local storage is just key/value queries, IndexedDB allows you to make range queries against indexes you define, so you can get eg: recent blog posts, etc.
if I want to store persist objects using localStorage, I'd convert them to JSON and store key-value. However I cannot store whole object hierarchy as it'll soon become an overkill.
so I store separate objects, and recreate relations upon retrieval manually. But I also need to maintain my own index - to know which objects I have stored under what keys.
As you see written in the spec, it was on the track to W3 Recommendation, but as every vendor who implemented it chose SQLite, there was little to do about it.
In other words, it isn't a "kill", just end of active maintainence. But spec as it is, is pretty solid. And WebSQL is here to stay in WebKit - there are just too many apps dependent on it to kill it. And no good reason to kill as there's no viable alternative on the horizon.
Summing up - WebKit (so iOS, Android and others) has it and will have it for quite a while, IE won't, FF won't too.
So reading all the comments I see that most "against" are because "Because if everyone used SQLite there would be no second implementation, which is something that is necessary for a proposed standard to become an actual standard."
WTF? Do we need to implement MySQL, PGSQL or MSSQL to get a chance of having SQL in our browsers? Does that sound stupid only to me? Is Mozilla trying to follow the "success" of IE? Who pays W3C? Why do they play like the God of Web? And why can't we have both? I certainly don't want to ever use IndexedDB if I have and SQL option.
So what does this mean for browsers that support web SQL and apps that are built on it? Is it likely that Safari, Chrome, etc. will drop support for it before a viable alternative is avaliable?
Lets hope it stays dead, seems that we just dodged a pretty nasty bullet. IndexDB seems to also be ridiculously complex, but as wicked as most standards are anything is better than SQL.
why would you write SQL with JavaScript? don't think that JavaScript yet at a point it can run heavy GUI element, handle AJAX, maybe Video or 3D and Query a database. JavaScript likes JSON very much, so all you need is just export your data with a language like PHP in JSON format, and handle it with JavaScript.
Just imagine how scary it wouldn't be if you understood the security implications and risks of cookies compared to the lack there of for a local browser db storage....
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. SQL works quite well in just about every language there is without introducing new syntax. Are you talking about something like LINQ? Nice, but unnecessary.
Presumably the W3C have decided to favour IndexedDB instead, which solves many of the same problems in a much more elegant, simple and well-specified fashion.