newhouseb

What is the state of the art here in terms of reliable data persistence?

Last I was seriously looking at the PWA route, I understood that they were best suited for apps with always-online access because anything stored locally could be more or less jettisoned as soon as the device felt disk pressure. Is that still the case or did I dream that up?

samwillis
We are very close to having WASM SQLite with persistence in the web platform. Until now SQLite compiled to WASM was in memory and you had to write the whole database out as a binary array to save changes. There is absurd-sql (https://github.com/jlongster/absurd-sql), which builds a virtual file system on top of IndexedDB for sqlite, it's incredible, but a bit of an ugly hack.

However, the new File System Access apis (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System...) that are landing in browsers will fix this. One of the things it does is enable very efficient block level read/write access to a privet sandboxed filesystem for the websites origin, perfect for persistent sqlite. There is more here: https://web.dev/file-system-access/#accessing-files-optimize...