Re: [IndexedDB] API feedback

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 9:52 AM, Kris Zyp <kris@sitepen.com> wrote:
> Would it possibly be more appropriate and expedient to only provide a
> sync API for now (and defer async support to possibly a later
> version)? It seems like the design of IndexedDB is such that most
> operations should occur in O(log n) time, and probably will be easily
> done under 100ms the majority of the time, and often under 10ms
> (especially with caching and such). With such short execution times,
> asynchronous APIs seem less crucial (than XHR for example, that can be
> very long-running) since IndexedDB blocking times are generally less
> than a user can perceive (and the concurrency benefits of async would
> largely be lost on single user browser apps). Anyway, I am not
> necessarily opposed to an async API, just wondering about the value,
> especially with the current design being pretty awkward to use as you
> pointed out.

No, I think that is a non-starter. Doing synchronous IO has been
explored before in other APIs and thoroughly abandoned.  I don't feel
like looking up a link now (you can probably do a search on the whatwg
archives for 'synchronous'), but basically:

* Disks can get busy, so even if an operation is *normally* fast, it
won't always be
* Disks can be remote, mounted over a network

- a

Received on Friday, 12 March 2010 18:34:08 UTC