Reading and Writing a File in Javascript for Win 8 Apps

http://nawegr.blogspot.com/2012/12/reading-and-writing-file-in-javascript.html

by EwanG • 14 years ago

10 13 14 years ago

nawegr.blogspot.com

some1else• 14 years ago

Wow. Thanks for writing it up, but that API just makes me cringe. That's what we had to deal with back in the day, but now we have abstract APIs like localStorage, Web SQL and Indexed DB [1]. At the very least, this wont gel with "Directories and System" component of the File API [2][3]. Microsoft will probably be implementing the W3C standard, but we may have to come up with a fileQuery.js library to do file-operations the same way across platforms until they see a need for it.

[1] http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/offline/storage/

[2] http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/file-system/file-dir-sys.html

[3] http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/file/filesystem/

PommeDeTerre3• 14 years ago

I find the whole situation quite absurd. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and most of the 2000s, we saw real advancements being made. Things were generally getting better over time.

Fortran made programming much more accessible. C and UNIX made for an effective, practical platform. Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk and ML brought some rigor and new ideas to the table. Perl and Python allowed for rapid development of scripts and prototypes. SQL let us really push relational databases to the limit. Even C++, Java and C# allowed for the development of large, real-world systems.

Then around 2007 or so, everything went completely stupid. We saw the rise of JavaScript and NoSQL, and things have only gotten worse since then. It's like we lost 50+ years of accumulated knowledge, programming language functionality, libraries and platform support.

What happened to our craft? Everything that was good is being discarded, in favor of languages, databases, APIs and platforms that are rubbish. It's not even a case of "worse is better". It's "worse is much worse".

camus• 14 years ago

Javascript is bad because Vendors like microsoft made it bad , to promote their own RIA tech ( silverlight ). IF ecmascript 4 would have been standardised in 2007 , javascript would be closer to ActionScript and Jscript.NET. they allow the same amount of functional programming than Javascript does yet are strongly typed , with classes , interfaces , etc ...

drivebyacct24• 14 years ago

Everything now is stupid and rubbish. Got it. Ignore D, Rust, Go, valid uses of NoSQL, advanced made to RDMS, etc.

Xcelerate• 14 years ago

I'm not sure why so many think Javascript is bad. In my opinion, the new version of ECMAScript is heading in the wrong direction by adding classes and more Java/C++ features. C++ has so much cruft I can't possibly remember all that stuff (the standard is hundreds of pages if I recall correctly). Javascript has the benefit of being a very powerful, light-weight language.

CoffeeScript removes the quirks of Javascripts and emphasizes the functional aspects. My Coffeescript code is easily more expressive than the C++ code to do something equivalent (as long as it's not low-level system stuff or HPC critical). First-class functions, maps, folds -- yes please! And even though Javascript objects aren't technically maps, everyone uses them for that (and V8 optimizes them for that) and the syntax is amazingly brief.

I think Javascript for a desktop API is a good idea. As to Microsoft's implementation of such a desktop API, I can't comment since I haven't used it.

EDIT: Just read through the Windows Javascript API. Holy crap, they screwed that up badly! So much potential...

drivebyacct24• 14 years ago

I don't see what's that wrong with the API other than they ought to have more aligned with the HTML5 APIs.

The code in the blog post is poor because it's width constrained and callback soup. Use of promises and/or better JS would help the appearance of the code.

EwanG• 14 years ago

But are you sure those would WORK? One of the things I had to wrap my head around early is that MS JS is not the same as ALL JS. You don't want to know what you have to do for a Global variable...

kstenson• 14 years ago

This application is being written on the WinRT platform which is a wrapper around win32 for writing windows 8 applications using HTML and Javascript. it's not really a browser application, it just happens to use html and javascript as it's UI layer hence it doesn't use things like localstorage or web sql etc.

bmuon• 14 years ago

+1 for a nice library that makes it look like the HTML5 API and that uses promises for both cases. I may even end up writing it myself.

Reading and Writing a File in Javascript for Win 8 Apps

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