> It’s hard to believe that as of 2016, the best method for offline storage in a web app was localStorage
IndexedDB has been around and usable for long enough that I used it on projects >3 years ago, with a fallback to localStorage just in case (looking at you, IE9). Apache Cordova even gave a nice little abstraction over sqlite so that using IndexedDB + phonegap was seamless and gave even more storage (IIRC). It was a pretty solid success for the data-heavy project I was on at the time. Load times the second time around were slashed to almost nothing. The app logic just needed to retrieve anything new since <latest timestamp> from the back end and update the UI.
Our experience was pretty great, though. I definitely highly recommend implementing some sort of domain-specific data caching layer with IndexedDB if you have the chance and if you're moving enough data to justify it. Just make sure you think through the update logic (e.g. use timestamps or log-structured data), and handle merge conflicts appropriately if necessary (i.e. if your app can be used offline).
There are plenty of great wrappers out there that simplify most use cases, too. We ended up going with localForage [1] to simplify refactoring away from localStorage.
What I would really like to see would be Realm in the browser. My experience using it (for mobile development) has been so much better than what I went through with IndexedDB as web developer that it is not even funny.
Now that Realm is entirely open source it could even be a real possibility to have support for it build into web browsers.
IndexedDB has been around and usable for long enough that I used it on projects >3 years ago, with a fallback to localStorage just in case (looking at you, IE9). Apache Cordova even gave a nice little abstraction over sqlite so that using IndexedDB + phonegap was seamless and gave even more storage (IIRC). It was a pretty solid success for the data-heavy project I was on at the time. Load times the second time around were slashed to almost nothing. The app logic just needed to retrieve anything new since <latest timestamp> from the back end and update the UI.
Our experience was pretty great, though. I definitely highly recommend implementing some sort of domain-specific data caching layer with IndexedDB if you have the chance and if you're moving enough data to justify it. Just make sure you think through the update logic (e.g. use timestamps or log-structured data), and handle merge conflicts appropriately if necessary (i.e. if your app can be used offline).
There are plenty of great wrappers out there that simplify most use cases, too. We ended up going with localForage [1] to simplify refactoring away from localStorage.
[1] https://github.com/localForage/localForage