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A future for SQL on the web

jlongster.com

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Re: A future for SQL on the web

#131

Post by BadInformatics »

monocasa wrote: post #113
tarsinge wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PWA are not a standard, they are a Google concept pushed through Chrome (OS). I’m fine with Apple never supporting it.

PWA is a Google term, but the whole web app thing is older than even the native app store on iPhone.

Google may have coined the term (not sure about this), but it's far from their own thing [1]. PWA should've been a blanket term for a set of standards and guidelines for developing web apps. Those include progressive enhancement, which I don't think most people would expect.

Unfortunately, the term has been co-opted to mean "website I can install/pin as an app". Again, Google is probably to blame for this, but AFAICT it was never meant to be the meaning of the term. What it does do is create misunderstandings, like a sibling thread claiming that (desktop) Firefox doesn't support PWAs because you can't install anything.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...

Re: A future for SQL on the web

#132

Post by stevage »

Fascinating. I'm really curious what the use case is that so many people seem to have. Why do you need so much data in the browser, and to be doing queries and data manipulation there? Where does the data come from? Don't you need to sync it back to a server somewhere?

Re: A future for SQL on the web

#133

Post by jmull »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #4

This is funny and sad to me. We had SQLite in the browser[0]. I only did a little bit of work with it but it seemed actually pretty nice. It was torpedoed because it was SQL-based (and not trendy "key value" and "web scale"). There was the whole excuse that the specification was "whatever SQLite does" and, therefore, not suitable for being a standard. There would be worse things than SQLite upon which to base a stand…

Building off what others have pointed out about sqlite not being a good choice for a browser standard, I just want to note that the approach laid out in the article is exactly the right approach to integrate sqlite into a web app: a web app links a version from a well-maintained “distro”. The issues inherent in trying to use an implementation as a specification and standard go away, while a “distro” maintained by experts will lower the bar to entry.

I think devs should be happy, not sad. It looks like we’re finally getting it right, and will have a feasible way to add the incredible sqlite to the set tools we have available to make web apps.

Hopefully absurd-sql keeps going and browsers adopt a good storage standard.

Re: A future for SQL on the web

#134

Post by fzzzy »

mschuster91 wrote: post #79
SahAssar wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The justification was more that the standardization process requires at least 2 independent implementations, and nobody was working on rewriting SQLite from scratch. I would have loved WebSQL, but it is reasonable to require multiple implementations for full standardization.

> and nobody was working on rewriting SQLite from scratch. One could also have embedded a trimmed-down PostgreSQL or MariaDB into browsers.

That sounds great! Let's do it.

Re: A future for SQL on the web

#135

Post by [deleted] »

411111111111111 wrote: post #62
kall wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think so too. It‘s a cliche by now to say these things go in cycles but they do. If we like this part of the cycle, let‘s ride it and let SQL get hyped, even though its been around forever and never went away.

What gives you the confidence that it's going on circles? I cannot see our industry repeating the mantra that NoSQL solves all our persistence problems ever again. There are use cases for them, but not everything is a good fit and I'm pretty sure we found that out as an industry. I'm sure there are always going to be individuals that will claim that they're better at everything, but that doesn't really mean anything.…

[deleted]

Re: A future for SQL on the web

#136

Post by mst »

TingPing wrote: post #116
mst wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So long as I can also use them in firefox they're 'unstandardised but not single vendor' and at that point I'm not as troubled about it.

Firefox doesn't support PWAs...

They don't support the same precise system, but you can e.g. definitely do installable apps on Firefox for Android: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...

Re: A future for SQL on the web

#137

Post by danlugo92 »

bob1029 wrote: post #96
justsomeuser wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice. What kind of business logic are you using SQL queries for?

Any sort of decision point that tends to vary between our customers. We are getting really tired of maintaining custom code piles.

By that you mean several piles in different languages? Or one pile for each customer?

Re: A future for SQL on the web

#138

Post by breckenedge »

guyromm wrote: post #103

i wonder if it's possible to plug any kind of streaming replication onto this. i don't have much sqlite experience, but maybe someone here has an idea if it would be possible to run litestream or something of the sort, as both master and slave - in the browser. that would solve the safari indexeddb 7 day ttl issue to start with. and if replication could be made to work on top of something like webrtc we're looking at…

There’s also CouchDB/PouchDB made for this use case.

Re: A future for SQL on the web

#139

Post by jbergens »

zzzeek wrote: post #43
EvanAnderson wrote: post #4

This is funny and sad to me. We had SQLite in the browser[0]. I only did a little bit of work with it but it seemed actually pretty nice. It was torpedoed because it was SQL-based (and not trendy "key value" and "web scale"). There was the whole excuse that the specification was "whatever SQLite does" and, therefore, not suitable for being a standard. There would be worse things than SQLite upon which to base a stand…

first thought, was there a "standard" for key/value stores? mongodb the reference implementation? overall, if you looked at HN like five years ago, every DB headline was key/value, mongodb, maybe some cassandra / couchdb, links to the "web scale" cartoon. these days, it's SQL SQL SQL, with a heavy dose of SQLite and PostgreSQL. SQL survived the key/value fad despite the nebulousness of a workable "standard" (yes ther…

I think sql is a bad fit for front end code in js. We may have ended up with another fight over ORMs. The Vietnam war of computer science as I think it was called.

Re: A future for SQL on the web

#140

Post by quickthrower2 »

stevage wrote: post #132

Fascinating. I'm really curious what the use case is that so many people seem to have. Why do you need so much data in the browser, and to be doing queries and data manipulation there? Where does the data come from? Don't you need to sync it back to a server somewhere?

This might be useful for a desktop-app like experience on the web. Imagine something like excel but you want to open a 100mb file and work with it right away. It can sync to the server as you are working but you just want to get working now.

Another use is privacy centric apps that send nothing to the server, using the web as a kind of “install” platform but nothing else.

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