On Nov 9, 2009, at 12:58 AM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
I think the likely outcome of the current situation will be that
new mobile
browsers will have a harder time establishing themselves in the
market,
since many popular mobile web apps will be using a database
technology where
the query language is not fully specified. That would be an
unfortunate
outcome.
I definitely agree that we don't want a solution that punishes the
mobile market. I think the way to do that is to ensure that SimpleDB
is useful even for mobile platforms.
I don't think SimpleDB is useless for mobile platforms. You
certainly *could* use it. But it does have three significant
downsides compared to the SQL database: (1) it's very different from
what developers have already (happily) been using on mobile;
Mobile and iPhone developers are among the quickest to adopt new
technologies, if I am not mistaken.
(2) the target design point is that it's primarily expected to be
used through JavaScript libraries layered on top, and not directly
(so you have to ship more code over the wire); and
WebSimpleDB will always remain easy and good to use directly, even
though it will also support those who want to use libraries on top.
Whether people would still prefer to use libraries or not, will depend
on their use case. Specific use cases would help to find a more
objective solution to your issue.
(3) for more complex queries, more of the work has to be done in
JavaScript instead of in the database engine (so performance will
likely be poor on low-power CPUs).
Those applications doing simple boolean index expression evaluation
could get better performance from WebSimpleDB than with SQLite because
of the overhead of parsing SQL, generating query plans, and optimizing
them without knowledge of index selectivity. Knowing the
sophistication of the average Web developer, such applications may
dominate the total set of queries run in implementations.
For these reasons, I expect a lot of mobile developers will stick
with the SQL database, even if we also provide something else.
If you have ideas for how to improve SimpeDB on these dimensions,
I'd be glad to hear it. But I'm not sure it's really possible to
address them without significantly changing the design direction of
SimpleDB, so I'm not really expecting they will be solved.
Could you help us find the use cases that explain what problems users
are likely to face with WebSimpleDB? If so, we could adjust the design
to better support them.
Nikunj
http://o-micron.blogspot.com
