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

> Why did you feel it was necessary to write a layer on top of IndexedDB?

I think this is the main issue here.

As it stands, IDB is great in terms of features and power it offers, but  
the feedback I recieved from other devs was that writing raw IndexedDB  
requires an uncomfortable amount of verbosity even for some simple tasks  
(This can be disputed, but that is the views I got from some of the  
developers I interacted with). Adding that much amount of code (once  
again, im talking of raw IndexedDB) makes it less readable and  
understandable. For beginners, this all seemed very intimidating, and for  
some people more experienced, it was a bit frustrating.

> For the latter bit, I reckon it would be a good practice for groups  
> working on low-level APIs to more or less systematically produce a  
> library that operates at a higher level. This would not only help  
> developers in that they could pick that up instead of the lower-level  
> stuff, but more importantly (at least in terms of goals) it would serve  
> to validate that the lower-level design is indeed appropriate for  
> librarification.

I think that would be a good idea. Also, people making those low level  
APIs should still keep in mind that the resulting code should not be too  
verbose or complex. Librarification should be an advantage, but not a de  
facto requirement for developers when it comes to such APIs. It should  
still be feasable for them to write code in the raw low level API without  
writing uncomfortably verbose or complex code for simple tasks. Spec  
designers of low level APIs should not take this as a license to make  
things so complex that only they and a few others understand it, and then  
hope that some others will go ahead and make it simple for the 'common  
folk' through an abstraction library.


-- 
Shwetank Dixit
Web Evangelist,
Web Standards Group
Opera Software - www.opera.com

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Received on Friday, 15 February 2013 15:02:27 UTC