Book Image

Javascript Unlocked

Book Image

Javascript Unlocked

Overview of this book

JavaScript stands bestride the world like a colossus. Having conquered web development, it now advances into new areas such as server scripting, desktop and mobile development, game scripting, and more. One of the most essential languages for any modern developer, the fully-engaged JavaScript programmer need to know the tricks, non-documented features, quirks, and best practices of this powerful, adaptive language. This all-practical guide is stuffed with code recipes and keys to help you unlock the full potential of JavaScript. Start by diving right into the core of JavaScript, with power user techniques for getting better maintainability and performance from the basic building blocks of your code. Get to grips with modular programming to bring real power to the browser, master client-side JavaScript scripting without jQuery or other frameworks, and discover the full potential of asynchronous coding. Do great things with HTML5 APIs, including building your first web component, tackle the essential requirements of writing large-scale applications, and optimize JavaScript’s performance behind the browser. Wrap up with in-depth advice and best practice for debugging and keeping your JavaScript maintainable for scaling, long-term projects. With every task demonstrated in both classic ES5 JavaScript and next generation ES6-7 versions of the language, Whether read cover-to-cover or dipped into for specific keys and recipes, JavaScript Unlocked is your essential guide for pushing JavaScript to its limits.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
JavaScript Unlocked
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Storing data in web-browser


Among the HTML5 features, there are a few intended to store data on the client side: Web Storage, IndexedDB, and FileSystem API. We benefit from these technologies when the following happens:

  • We want to cache client-side data to make them fetch-able without extra HTTP requests

  • We have a significant amount of local data in the web application, and we want our application to work offline

Let's take a look at these technologies.

Web Storage API

In the past, we only had the mechanism to keep the application state, and it was using HTTP cookies. Besides unfriendly API, cookies have a few flaws. They generally have a maximum size of about 4 KB. So we simply cannot store any decent amount of data. Cookies don't really fit when the application state is being changed in different tabs. Cookies are vulnerable to Cross-Site Scripting attacks.

Now we have an advanced API called Web Storage. It provides greater storage capacity (5-25 MB depending on the browser) and doesn't attach...