Actually used it for a desktop blogging app a few years ago. It was great! I could set up a blog skeleton, send the file to a family member. They could focus on writing content and hitting deploy.
SQLite as an Application File Format
21–30 of 108 posts
Re: SQLite as an Application File Format
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because Windows can view and extract them out of the box without installing any additional applications. If it supported anything better out of the box I'd guess people would use that instead.
"The operating system makes it easy to mess with" doesn't seem like a particularly useful property for application file formats.
It was, back when software development was run by hackers and not suits and security people. Easy access was a feature for users, too; back in those days, software was a tool that worked on data, it didn't try to own the data.
Re: SQLite as an Application File Format
#23I remember someone mentioning the Acorn image editor on Mac uses sql files to store image data. It probably makes backwards compatibility much easier to work with.
Re: SQLite as an Application File Format
#24I remember someone mentioning the Acorn image editor on Mac uses sql files to store image data. It probably makes backwards compatibility much easier to work with.
It does, here's a schema from an image I just saved with the latest version. Pretty simple.
CREATE TABLE image_attributes ( name text, value blob);
CREATE TABLE layers (id text, parent_id text, sequence integer, uti text, name text, data blob);
CREATE TABLE layer_attributes ( id text, name text, value blob);
Re: SQLite as an Application File Format
#25Somehow my first thought from the title was using sqlite as a format for applications. So like a replacement for ELF. I think this idea is both fascinating and horrifying.
Forget elf, imagine having a SQLite file that stores elf, exe and DMG binaries. I would not mind working on something like this.
Re: SQLite as an Application File Format
#26Re: SQLite as an Application File Format
#27SQLite is abolutely amazing as an app format! I couldn't list how many tools are available to read SQLite data, or how easy and friendly they are. Even its CLI does wonders when you're dealing with data with it. SQLite has been around for 20+ years and is one of the most heavily tested softwares in the world.
SQLite is very simple, yet very reliable and powerful. Using SQLite as file format might be the best decision an engineer can take when it comes to future-proofing preservation of data.
Re: SQLite as an Application File Format
#28Re: SQLite as an Application File Format
#29Bit unrelated rant but I'm still not sure why ZIP has been adopted as an Application File Format rather than anything else. It is a remanent of a DOS era with questionable choices, why would you pick it over anything else?
I think most format use "gzip" instead of "zip".
gzip is not an archive container. You're thinking of .tar.gz which is a "tape archive" format which is compressed using gzip. Zip is by itself both a compression and an archive format, and is what documents like epub or docx use
Re: SQLite as an Application File Format
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
It makes it easy for me to find additional commentary for things I’m interested in, and I appreciate that. There’s no policing going on. If you find it off-putting, that’s your problem.
as i said and you ignored, all it does is put people off from having fresh conversations.