Written by Over the years, the web has increasingly transformed from being a repository of content to a marketplace of full-fledged functional apps. The suite of technologies that fall under the “HTML5” banner have, as a fundamental goal, the capabilities to build within this new breed of software. In this article, I’ll review a technology that solves an important piece of the application puzzle—managing storage and retrieval of user-specific data on the client side—called “IndexedDB.”
What is IndexedDB?
An IndexedDB is basically a persistent data store in the browser—a database on the client side. Like regular relational databases, it maintains indexes over the records it stores and developers use the IndexedDB JavaScript API to locate records by key or by looking up an index. Each database is scoped by “origin,” i.e. the domain of the site that creates the database.
IndexedDB is also a great example of how web standards evolve. Through standards working groups and HTML5 Labs (a site that publishes prototype implementations of various HTML5 specifications so you can try them out and provide feedback), IndexedDB will soon be ready for prime time site use.
