W3C Working Group Just Killed Web SQL Database

http://www.w3.org/TR/webdatabase/

by Udo • 16 years ago

85 84 16 years ago

jchrisa3• 16 years ago

This spec isn't the only game for offline storage. IndexedDB is the favored replacement: http://www.w3.org/TR/IndexedDB/

I like it because the API is much more web-like than SQL. Others have other reasons to prefer it.

Udo• 16 years ago

It is a replacement, but I'm not really sure whether it's a good one. SQL was a nice choice because it made writing hybrid applications (with online and offline DB storage) very easy, and it was using an API that was already well known and understood. At this point it's unclear if IndexedDB is actually going anywhere, it's a prime example of a lifeless spec being prescribed from "high above". It might get adopted, maybe browser makers will force web devs to do it in the end, but SQL already has been proven more than workable in the field whereas IndexedDB has not.

henryprecheur3• 16 years ago

SQL is certainly a well-known _language_, but I don't think it's very well understood by most.

Also if IndexedDB has a "lifeless" spec, it might be because there's not much to discuss. Something simple and straightforward tends to requires much less discussion and debate, than something complex.

jamesaguilar2• 16 years ago

For someone unfamiliar with the term, what does "web-like" mean?

Groxx13• 16 years ago

I'll be obtuse, and claim it means "JavaScript-like". You know, multiple "truthy" values, the inability to detect the difference between arrays and objects, a weird mashup of OO and functional abilities, `=== undefined` but `isNaN()`, and no real difference between integers and floats, and all the math weirdness that goes with them. Browsers implementing the same thing different ways, interacting with a system (the DOM) that's the same but different everywhere, and patched together by multiple, usually-mutually-exclusive libraries that everyone uses instead of the actual language.

(disclaimer: I've come to quite like JS, it's made some of my experiments phenomenally simple. but it's weird.)

jchrisa3• 16 years ago

An API that maps to the underlying data-structure (btree, ranges, cursors), is bar-none simpler than an API that abtracts the underlying data structure away (like any SQL does).

The web was built by taking existing systems, and cutting away at them until they were so simple they barely worked. But because they were simple they could spread.

IndexedDB isn't the simplest spec it could be (I think they could do-away with transactions if they were willing to require MVCC semantics) but it is admirably simple for a database.

henryprecheur3• 16 years ago

I think that's a great news. HTML5 adds lots of complexity in the browser, and yet don't address most of the fundamental problems of HTML: security, complexity. Web SQL was another step in the wrong direction.

Local storage wont go away. I hope Web SQL will be replaced by something "better" and more straightforward, A simple key-value database would be great.

patrickaljord• 16 years ago

> A simple key-value database would be great.

That's exactly it:

http://www.w3.org/TR/IndexedDB/

jhrobert3• 16 years ago

A NoSQL win

duskwuff• 16 years ago

IndexedDB is anything but simple.

halo2• 16 years ago

Probably a good thing. The most complex part of Web SQL amounted to "Whatever SQLite implements", neither Mozilla nor Microsoft supported it making the standard effectively irrelevent, and I remain thoroughly unconvinced that providing an extremely thin JavaScript API to an SQL-driven database is an elegant solution to this particular problem.

Presumably the W3C have decided to favour IndexedDB instead, which solves many of the same problems in a much more elegant, simple and well-specified fashion.

ergo982• 16 years ago

The most complex part of Web SQL effectively amounted to "Whatever SQLite implemented"

Which is one of the most tested, most utilized, most known pieces of code used among modern software. Saying "reference it" is entirely rational. And really the ludicrous notion that documenting its behaviors is unfathomably difficult is so asinine that it demolishes that line of argument.

neither Mozilla nor Microsoft supported it

Microsoft doesn't REALLY support either: Does IE9 have IndexedDB? Not that I'm aware of.

Microsoft's angle regarding Web Databases was nothing more than "I don't know...that looks mighty uppity for a web app..."

Mozilla is taking a very myopic, "high-road" approach that is similar to, and less justifiable, the whole h.264 debacle: Everyone loses, but someone gets to hold their head up high.

Further, Chrome, Safari, Opera, other...none of them support IndexedDB, so as a standard it is effectively irrelevant.

Presumably the W3C have decided to favour IndexedDB instead, which solves many of the same problems in a much more elegant, simple and well-specified fashion.

Ha ha ha!

The IndexedDB spec right now has incredible gaps that make it close to useless. The braintrust at Mozilla that are responsible for it can't stop themselves from saying "CouchDB" long enough to actually work on it, it seems.

I think they got caught up in the whole NoSQL thing. So much so that they now seriously advocate that libraries should pop up inefficiently implementing SQL on top of IndexedDB, which is just saddening.

But aside from that, rah!

henryprecheur3• 16 years ago

Which is one of the most tested, most utilized, most known pieces of code used among modern software.

Sounds like Microsoft Windows to me :)

I think that SQLite is a really nice database. But just because SQLite would work in the browser, doesn't mean W3C shouldn't try to do something better.

Groxx13• 16 years ago

>I think they got caught up in the whole NoSQL thing.

I was hesitating saying something to that effect in my comment, but seeing as someone else has broken the ice, what the hell:

This whole IndexedDB push by Mozilla has seemed a side-effect of the SQL/NoSQL hubbub, and not much else. There's legitimate use for IndexedDB, and it does a couple things better than WebDatabases do, and it's closer to writing JavaScript... but there's almost no reason to not implement WebDatabase by dropping an SQLite engine into your system. And why the hell couldn't they have picked something that already exists to a certain degree, rather than making everyone start from scratch in optimizations?

edit: to go a step further:

>Implementors should be aware that this specification is not stable. Implementors who are not taking part in the discussions are likely to find the specification changing out from under them in incompatible ways.

They sound kinda like they're complaining about all this, in a "you'll see! You'll all see!" sort of way. I think it's a power-struggle thing; there's a standard on the web they don't and can't control, because everyone went ahead and agreed on something without them while they were busy making it way more opaque and complicated than it is / needs to be.

halo2• 16 years ago

The truth is the reason they pointed to SQLite is because the proposed API was so obscenely complicated that it was easier to point to a reference implementation than to accurately specify a standard, which points to a rather fundamental problem with the proposed standard: SQL is too damn complicated, and embedding it in browsers is a bad idea.

For a web standard to succeed, you need either Mozilla or Microsoft support, preferably both. They have 75% of the browser market between them, so without either any standard is dead on arrival. Chrome, Safari and Opera individually do not have enough marketshare to be a significant influence on the takeup of web standards and still follow in the footsteps of the others. Incidentally, Chrome does support IndexedDB (http://peter.sh/2010/10/indexeddb-milestone-8-es5-strict-mod...).

Mozilla have made it clear they are supporting IndexedDB and not WebSQL. Microsoft have publicly posted remarks of support of IndexedDB on the IE blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/03/09/working-with-t...) and Pablo Castro, an architect involved with web standards has publicly favoured IndexedDB over WebSQL (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/pablo/archive/2010/01/04/html5-does-...). It's not always easy to judge the inner workings of Microsoft, but I think it's a pretty strong hint as to what they are working on.

The IndexedDB spec seems relatively well-specified to me, and much more detailed than the WebSQL spec. Incidentally, the original authorship of WebSimpleDB was Nikunj Mehta, who was an Oracle employee at the time. The standard didn't originally come from any "braintrust at Mozilla".

nl2• 16 years ago

The most complex part of Web SQL effectively amounted to "Whatever SQLite implemented"

The proposal wasn't to standardize on the SQLite implementation, it was to reverse engineer it and write a standards document from its behavior.

No one (including the maintainers of the Webkit-based implementations that had WebSQL) thought that was a good idea, but there weren't any good other proposals. Unlike WebSQL, IndexDB does have consensus amongst browser vendors. Microsoft haven't implemented it in IE9 yet, but are planning to support it [1]. IE9 does already support HTML5 localStorage, which is closely related to IndexDB (that close relationship is one of the reasons why IndexDB makes more sense to me that WebSQL)

As far as the NoSQL thing is concerned, I think it's interesting to note that IndexDB's semantics closely match those of BerkeleyDB, which started life in 1991. Work first started on IndexDB in 2006 [2], long before the term NoSQL was invented.

tldr; The SQLite software was never going to be the standard, rather one would be reverse engineered from it, and IndexDB predated (by far) the current trend towards "NoSQL" databases.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/03/09/working-with-t... [2]: http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/IndexedDB/

pornel3• 16 years ago

Because there is only one implementation, no matter how good it is, websites would end up relying on every bug and quirk in SQLite.

SQLite isn't quite SQL. It has weakly dynamically typed columns (will happily store strings in INT column), and ROWID/auto increment is icky (magic behavior with special-casing for backwards compatibility).

sid012• 16 years ago

For any web standard to be valid there need to be two different implementations. There is no second implementation for Web SQL.

kazuya• 16 years ago

> The most complex part of Web SQL amounted to "Whatever SQLite implements"

Why are you so wary of SQLite? As TCP/IP demonstrates, a rock solid implementation is a great help for standardization.

bni• 16 years ago

No, it sucks. Having Client side relational storage in a client side web app is a very powerful thing.

Having this on disconnected devices is a very common use case. These types of applications has been written in crummy VB6 or .NET code for a long time on handheld devices, etc. I guess they will continue to be written in it then.

Key/value stores and key/value stores with ponies and rainbows (NoSQL) is not a sufficently general solution to replace the relational model.

wmf4• 16 years ago

I'm disappointed by the vendor war attitude in this thread. Why don't Mozilla or MS support WebSQL? Do they have some objection to it or have they just not gotten around to implementing it yet?

jfb2• 16 years ago

Why, again, was this needed? HTML5 is already looking like a security and management shitstorm; anything that makes it simpler is fine by me.

Groxx13• 16 years ago

How is a domain-locked local SQL database a security shitstorm?

jfb2• 16 years ago

I suppose I'm just jumpy because of the lack of granularity in user control over local storage, and wary of the eptitude of the browser vendors, and in favor of fewer, smaller features. After reading the inept IndexedDB thing, however, it seems like the wrong local storage mechanism is going to get it in the neck.

Locke1689• 16 years ago

XSS and SOP disasters. Basically, everything that was broken about the web before, but more broken-y now. This of course applies to HTML5 local storage, too.

Groxx13• 16 years ago

Not quite, methinks:

>This document was on the W3C Recommendation track but specification work has stopped. The specification reached an impasse: all interested implementors have used the same SQL backend (Sqlite), but we need multiple independent implementations to proceed along a standardisation path.

That notice has been up for quite a while now. They're just making it plainer that they've given up, because there's already a spec out there that they don't have control of.

Also, to perform a join in IndexedDB, you've gotta do it by hand, iterating over the results and merging data programmatically[1]. While WebDatabases have a PITA async-only API for reasons which are entirely beyond my comprehension, SQL is an incredibly capable language for interacting with a database, and has very mature and efficient implementations. Losing that would count as a massive loss to me. Why can't we have both? WebKit / Chrome is already going this route, as they have WebDatabase and recently implemented IndexedDB as well.

[1] http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/comparing-indexeddb-and-web... example 4

nl2• 16 years ago

While WebDatabases have a PITA async-only API for reasons which are entirely beyond my comprehension

That's because they want to support responsive applications. Javascript doesn't really have native concurrency operations, so the best (only?) way to do it is via async operations.

It's like XMLHttpRequest: Async only, which can be harder to program, but makes it a lot more robust.

nex3• 16 years ago

> Javascript doesn't really have native concurrency operations

Except for Web Workers, also part of HTML5. The way Google Gears handled this was to allow synchronous database operations only in worker contexts.

bluedevil2k• 16 years ago

There's enough security/privacy issues with cookies, and those are simple text strings. Imagine the issues a nefarious mind could cause with a DB.

drivebyacct23• 16 years ago

Just imagine how scary it wouldn't be if you understood the security implications and risks of cookies compared to the lack there of for a local browser db storage....

ronaldj• 16 years ago

Am I the only one that's sad about this?

jhrobert3• 16 years ago

I am sad only to extend that there is some juice in SQL that the SQL people where unable to inject into JavaScript, either because of lazyness or more probably because they will never compromise at the syntax level when times come to reduce the impedance mismatch between two different language syntaxes.

bphogan• 16 years ago

No, in fact I'm mighty upset about this and have been for some time, mainly cos the damn thing isn't vaporware. It exists in Safari and Chrome, whereas IndexedDB works nowhere yet but "sounds neat."

I want to see what WebKit browsers are going to do. I use this in a couple of small HTML5 offline apps.

k7d• 16 years ago

Yeah, me too. I think it's just politics, in the best traditions of big corporations, that doesn't do any good to actual web developers.

From practical perspective we would be better off with Web SQL DB. Functionally it addresses everything a developer needs to create offline HTML apps. API is not perfect but you can always improve that with small wrapper libraries (like JQuery improves DOM API). You can always easily implement IndexDB-like API on top off SQL if you really want that. The opposite is probably possible but much more difficult.

Also I think IndexDB might turn out to be yet another compatibility headache because everybody will be creating their own implementation (I'm pretty sure there will be at least 3 - Microsoft, Mozilla & Webkit). It's a speculation but most likely this wouldn't be an issue with Web SQL DB because everybody would just use the same SQLLite backend.

And worst of all, this is delaying progress of web applications. Lack of solid cross-browser client-side storage solution is the last big gap for next generation of web applications. If everybody had just agreed on SQLLite we could be there today... now it's still unknown when we will get there.

sid012• 16 years ago

For a proposed web standard to become an actual web standard there need to be at least two implementations. This is a good, healthy thing. There was going to be no second implementation of Web SQL, so it was never going to become a standard.

anarchitect• 16 years ago

Well it's annoying that I've just finished coding a fairly complicated class this week which relies solely on Web SQL!

Thankfully the app (a touchscreen kiosk which you'll see in a few museums in London) runs only in Chrome, so it'll be fine for as long as it's supported there.

jhrobert3• 16 years ago

If the SQL guys were serious about their shit they should have patch some JavaScript at the syntax level.

Instead they pushed/lobbied for the usual broken binding that is the very reason SQL is so contreversed: impedance mismatch.

Of course, hacking a javascript parser to introduce some SQL semantic in it is not exactly "easy"

Basically, the initiative was doomed from day one, what a waste of time...

rsanders2• 16 years ago

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. SQL works quite well in just about every language there is without introducing new syntax. Are you talking about something like LINQ? Nice, but unnecessary.

Eil• 16 years ago

So is IndexedDB a beefier version of localStorage or does it serve a different purpose altogether?

jchrisa3• 16 years ago

Local storage is just key/value queries, IndexedDB allows you to make range queries against indexes you define, so you can get eg: recent blog posts, etc.

mindeh2• 16 years ago

yeah. to give an example:

if I want to store persist objects using localStorage, I'd convert them to JSON and store key-value. However I cannot store whole object hierarchy as it'll soon become an overkill.

so I store separate objects, and recreate relations upon retrieval manually. But I also need to maintain my own index - to know which objects I have stored under what keys.

jasongullickson• 16 years ago

So what does this mean for browsers that support web SQL and apps that are built on it? Is it likely that Safari, Chrome, etc. will drop support for it before a viable alternative is avaliable?

pornel3• 16 years ago

It will be maintained until IndexedDB becomes viable.

Perhaps someone will write JS library that implements IndexedDB on top of WebSQL (or vice-versa).

amattie• 16 years ago

No one has mentioned yet that both Android and iPhone implemented SQLite as described in the draft spec. There's a tremendous number of developers -- including myself -- who have built apps against it. The described spec may not become commonplace in desktop browsers, but it's an entirely different story on advanced mobile devices where Mozilla / Microsoft have nearly zero influence.

I definitely don't see this just suddenly evaporating or going unmaintained in those platforms.

briandon• 16 years ago

SQLite is already baked into Firefox and available to Firefox itself and to extensions/addons, although not available to web page authors:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Storage

Hixie• 16 years ago

The W3C didn't kill it, it was Mozilla and Microsoft who decided they didn't want to implement it (for a variety of reasonable reasons) and me who decided to not continue working on a spec that didn't have all the browser vendors on board.

mindeh2• 16 years ago

The heading is misleading imho.

As you see written in the spec, it was on the track to W3 Recommendation, but as every vendor who implemented it chose SQLite, there was little to do about it.

In other words, it isn't a "kill", just end of active maintainence. But spec as it is, is pretty solid. And WebSQL is here to stay in WebKit - there are just too many apps dependent on it to kill it. And no good reason to kill as there's no viable alternative on the horizon.

Summing up - WebKit (so iOS, Android and others) has it and will have it for quite a while, IE won't, FF won't too.

DjDarkman• 16 years ago

Just great, it just seemed like we will have something this decade, but sadly that will not be the case.

I have read the comments in Mozilla's thread http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis-... they clearly don't give a damn about what the users want.

They should have just agreed on a simple subset of SQL instead of going NoSQL, but apparently that wasn't good enough for them, waiting a decade more for something to store data in is probably better.

I personally love the concept of NoSQL, it's just that IndexedDB needs a few more years, which means it will probably even miss IE10.

uriel• 16 years ago

Lets hope it stays dead, seems that we just dodged a pretty nasty bullet. IndexDB seems to also be ridiculously complex, but as wicked as most standards are anything is better than SQL.

alkavan• 16 years ago

why would you write SQL with JavaScript? don't think that JavaScript yet at a point it can run heavy GUI element, handle AJAX, maybe Video or 3D and Query a database. JavaScript likes JSON very much, so all you need is just export your data with a language like PHP in JSON format, and handle it with JavaScript.

ficeto• 16 years ago

So reading all the comments I see that most "against" are because "Because if everyone used SQLite there would be no second implementation, which is something that is necessary for a proposed standard to become an actual standard." WTF? Do we need to implement MySQL, PGSQL or MSSQL to get a chance of having SQL in our browsers? Does that sound stupid only to me? Is Mozilla trying to follow the "success" of IE? Who pays W3C? Why do they play like the God of Web? And why can't we have both? I certainly don't want to ever use IndexedDB if I have and SQL option.

W3C Working Group Just Killed Web SQL Database

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