JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

An in-depth article about the state of client-side storage on mobile devices.

As web apps get richer and richer, more and more developers are using browser-side storage. However, there hasn't been a major study comparing the limitations of the various storage mechanisms. It is time consuming for developers to research each method and browser. So in this article, I'm going to show you the results of my research on the upper limit of each browser's storage implementation, as well as how you can inspect them.

In this article, I’d like to share everything I’ve been learning while developing the support for IndexedDB inside our 3D WebGL Babylon.JS game engine. Indeed, since 1.4.x, we’re now supporting storing & loading the JSON scenes containing our 3d meshes and their .PNG or .JPG textures as blobs from IndexedDB.

This article is built around my own experience on this topic. It’s based on the way I’ve solved the various issues I have encountered while working with IDB. You’ll then find someexplanations & tips on what you must pay attention to when you’ll work with IndexedDB. I will also share how and why we’re using it inside our 3d WebGL engine. Still, this article may be helpful for anybody looking at IndexedDB in general. 3d gaming will just serve as an illustration of its usage.

Welcome to the final part of my IndexedDB series. When I began this series my intent was to explain a technology that is not always the most… friendly one to work with. In fact, when I first tried working with IndexedDB, last year, my initial reaction was somewhat negative (“Somewhat negative” much like the Universe is “somewhat old.”). It’s been a long journey, but I finally feel somewhat comfortable working with IndexedDB and I respect what it allows. It is still a technology that can’t be used everywhere (it sadly missed being added to iOS7), but I truly believe it is a technology folks can learn and make use of today.

In this final article, we’re going to demonstrate some additional concepts that build upon the “full” demo we built in the last article. To be clear, you must be caught up on the series or this entry will be difficult to follow, so you may also want to check out part one.

One of the more interesting developments in web standards lately is the Indexed Database (IndexedDB for short) specification. For a fun time you can read the spec yourself. In this tutorial I’ll be explaining this feature and hopefully giving you some inspiration to use this powerful feature yourself.

In a nutshell, IndexedDB provides a way for you to store large amounts of data on your user’s browser. Any application that needs to send a lot of data over the wire could greatly benefit from being able to store that data on the client instead. Of course storage is only part of the equation. IndexedDB also provides a powerful indexed based searching API to retrieve the data you need.

We’ve covered the specification and support, now let’s look at using the feature. The very first thing we should do is check for IndexedDB support. While there are tools out there that provide generic ways to check for browser features, we can make this much simpler since we’re just checking for one particular thing.