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Comment by harryvederci | Hacker News Reader

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harryvederci

I can already imagine the youtube video titles:

"Mozilla and Microsoft TRIED to block it, but COULDN'T stop it!"

Seriously though, I can't wait to use this for my website. This is going to be ridiculously awesome combined with htmx.

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What features will this unlock for you?

Serving my htmx app as a WASM app, so interaction by users will be done on their computer. Then only the DB changes will be have to be synced with the backend, saving a lot of traffic / server capacity. This was already possible, but then the user's changes would be lost if they don't sync in time. If I understand things correctly this is the missing piece: persistence. So if the user goes offline and makes changes, those will persist so they can be synced when the user goes online again.

(All of this is as far as I understand things, I could be completely wrong.)

Isn't that model (without the wasm part) alread possible with pouchdb/couchdb?

I haven't looked into those, but I'm happily using SQLite already, and this would mean I won't have to swap it for something else to achieve the same thing.

> If I understand things correctly this is the missing piece: persistence. So if the user goes offline and makes changes, those will persist so they can be synced when the user goes online again.

1. You can persist data with localStorage/IndexDB, can't you? 2. There is nothing in the article about syncing. There is no out-of-the-box solution, as I can see.

> You can persist data with localStorage/IndexDB, can't you?

I guess so, but given the situation that I'd already be using WASM SQLite in the client's browser, then I'd have to implement that part myself, or use something like Absurd SQL. I'd rather use the implementation made by the creator of SQLite.

> There is nothing in the article about syncing.

Correct, that's something I'll have to do myself. I don't see any issues there though, I'd just need to verify the user is authorised to make those changes, which in my specific use case seems pretty trivial.

Querying already cached data without reimplementing the query logic in javascript. How… I mean this is so obvious to have a RDBMS local to any non-basic app, why are you even asking? No offense, I just don’t understand how to create webapps and be not bothered by a lack of fundamental things. Some e-stores and sites literally reach server on each tick on a sidebar, when it could be a fragmentarily replicated local database with a background periodic or live sync. Imagine adjusting a filter and not waiting for reload and rescroll in a “web 2.0” app, when an entire dataset is comparable to a bundle.min.js and a roundtrip to it is 1000x+ slower than a query itself. E.g. a page where I buy t-shirts is barely a megabyte of json (sans images) for all items, but it spends probably half an hour in awaiting responses when I’m shopping around. An app like that shouldn’t even make requests, apart from downloading new jpegs and one narrow replication stream. Even for open-in-new-tab, because resources are cached and a dataset is in sync.

Why do you need RDBMS for it? localStorage/IndexDB isn't enough?

Check out “SQLite as an application file format”, https://www.sqlite.org/appfileformat.html

And how does it help in case of frontend development? A half of those points don't apply to web dev. Do you really need joins? Do you really need atomic transactions? Do you really need SQL? Most of API's that used by web apps operate with objects or arrays of objects. Why should we add complexity of SQL if we already can store those objects in a plain array?

This logic is flawed. X is not in Y, so we shouldn’t add it, because currently in Y no one is using neither X nor some crippled parody of it.

You haven't answered the questions. I don't see a reason to use RDBMS in a browser, if it's not, for example, an SQL tutorial site. You gave an example of a t-shirt store. A plain array of JS objects is enough to store items in a browser. Why do you need a fully backed RDBMS for it?

Because it’s a better programming model.

> better

Sorry, but it's just you opinion. Do you have proofs of how t-shirt store will benefit of putting RDBMS on a client side (how much space does it take BTW) instead of using simple list of objects?

And you still haven't answered the questions.

It helps because apps are often used to view or edit files. By “files” I mean things like word doc files, photoshop files, Apple Keynote files. Many people like working with files and saving them locally, rather than on a server. With SQLite running in the browser, a file that is an SQLite database can be very easily read into memory, worked with, then saved back to disk. The page I linked explains this in detail. There are some examples of companies taking this approach at https://www.sqlite.org/appfileformat.html. Hope this extra detail is helpful.

Edit: Additionally, I encourage you to experiment with this. If you haven’t already, you may be surprised at how efficient/compact SQLite files are. They’re significantly more compact that JSON or XML documents and can include binary files like images. It’s much simpler to use SQLite as a file format than to create a custom binary file format.

If your app lets users sort, search, group, join or transform non-trivial data then SQL requires far fewer lines of code than procedural JavaScript, especially if you don't know ahead of time all the different ways in which users might want to query the data. It's definitely not useful for every kind of app though.

Think of something like personal finance, accounting, payroll, project management, CRM, zettelkasten style note taking, health and fitness tracking, etc, where users may want flexible analysis and reporting tools.

Much of this is now done on the backend, which makes sense if the data is accessed by many users in a transactional manner. But if it's a single user app or something used by tiny teams then cutting latency down to zero could greatly improve usability while still benefitting from everything a real query engine has to offer.

I agree that it could work for a single user web app that works locally, but it's a pretty rare case.

It has indeed been a pretty rare case for web apps, but it's a not completely insignificant niche for desktop and mobile apps. Some of those (e.g many Electron apps) could become pure web apps if more of their enabling technologies were available as WASM modules. I think this SQLite initiative as well as the underlying file system access API is part of that trend.

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