Re: IndexedDB, what were the issues? How do we stop it from happening again?

On Wednesday, 13 February 2013 at 11:39, Miko Nieminen wrote:

> 2013/2/11 Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com (mailto:w3c@marcosc.com)>
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > On Monday, 11 February 2013 at 20:44, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
> > 
> > > IndexedDB is an API for that kind of work scoped to the needs of DBMS
> > > engines that aren't necessarily so called SQL RDBMS variants. For folks
> > > that write the kind of drivers outlined above, it looks fine.
> > 
> > 
> > Sure, but I thought these APIs were made for "Web Developers" and not the niche group of people who write database drivers. I'm trying to track down the statistics about Web developers (education attainment, etc. I know there are some stats somewhere, so if anyone has a pointer...). I imagine most, like me, do not hold a degree in computer science or software engineering (if they hold a degree at all!). That's not too say we are less capable than people that do, but we are skilled in different areas.
> 
> I think IndexedDB is almost good enough for writing all kinds of abstractions and reusable libraries on top of it.
Sure, but this still means having to download a whole bunch of stuff to be able to use IndexedDB. It means all users have to now pay a tax (and i mean literally pay money on phones plus waste time) because they need to download your library in addition to the code the developer needs to write to make their software work. It's the same problem as with JQuery: it should't need to exist and such a massive amount of the Web should not need to *rely on it*. That's a failing on the part of standardisation to create APIs that developers can actually use, IMO. 

What I'm saying is that it should be *a choice* to use a JS library - because it does something really cool or really does take the pain out of development. But, to me, it's a failing that an API be designed to be so unusable by the developer community that it must rely on others to build stuff to make it actually usable. 

IMO, it's *not ok* to force people to download a JS library to make a native browser APIs usable. It's great that you, and others have gone to the effort to make the IndexedDB API usable to average developers (and I'm truly thankful that you've gone to the trouble): hopefully these usable APIs can be taken back to the Web Apps Working Group and an API Web Developer friendly version of the API can be standardised.  
> Only major issue I'm having is the lack of ability to listen add, modify, delete events through object store. This makes writing additional abstractions unnecessarily painful when keeping things in-sync requires routing notifications through local storage or other similar mechanism.
> 
> So to raise my original question: what do you think, do I have any realistic chances to get forward with this change?
> 

You would need to raise that with public-webapps (as you said you did) or talk directly to the editors on IRC or face to face. Presenting use cases is important, particularly if it shows a pain point and that your users are relying on it. 

-- 
Marcos Caceres
http://datadriven.com.au

Received on Wednesday, 13 February 2013 12:06:52 UTC