Status report and planning for TPAC 2021

[LJWatson]

TPAC will be virtual again this year. There will be a WebApps WG meeting at some point between 24 and 29 October.

There are two things we need you to do in the meantime:

1. Let @marcoscaceres and I know before 17 September if you plan to hold a specification specific meeting (in addition to the general WebApps WG meeting)
2. Post a specification status report before 30 September

Your specification status report should include:

• What progress has your spec made in the last 12 months?
• Is anything blocking your spec from moving to CR?
• If yes, what is your plan to unblock it and do you need any help?

CC @siusin

[inexorabletash]

@LJWatson and @marcoscaceres - no need to have a specification meeting this cycle; if other implementers want one, would be happy to facilitate or attend though.

[inexorabletash]

Oops, past the deadline for specification status report. Here we go...

Specification Status Report - TPAC 2021

Progress in the last 12 months

Extremely limited progress. Implementers appear to be focusing elsewhere (e.g. Storage Foundation and Access Handles). Google Chrome does plan to invest more in Indexed DB performance in 2022, and plans to explore if new indexing-related functionality could help developers migrate from other APIs (e.g. WebSQL) w/o performance degredations.

Normative changes:

• Correct assertion that a transaction's scope is a "set of object stores" that is "fixed for the lifetime of that transaction", which is not true for upgrade transactions.

Editorial updates:

• Use sorting definitions from infra
• Textual simplifications, e.g. drop "running" from algorithm invocation

Implementer updates:

• Safari 14 supports databases()

Updated discussion / issues:

• Renewed interest in support for boolean keys #76
• At TPAC 2019 we discussed putAll() for batch population of stores.
  • Initial implementation experiments in Chrome showed no meaningful performance improvement, although we don't have high confidence in the results and would welcome other implementer feedback. #69
  • Following Chrome's pause of work on putAll(), there was more discussion about pre-filling stores with JSON #224
• More support expressed for a closed property on database connections. #333
• More discussion about explicit control over transaction lifetimes #34
• Requests for editorial changes - PRs welcome!
  • Rename "array key" to "composite key" (filed by the editor)? #360
  • Clarify that consistency model is strict serializability #355
  • Clarify that IDBTransaction.onerror fires when errors bubble up from requests #353
  • Clarify queueing behavior when opening a database #354

Miscellaneous:

• Migrated from Travis-CI to GitHub Actions

Moving to CR?

• Need to go to FPWD first. #268 - I think we've all been busy.
• Set of normative changes since v2 is still fairly minimal revision history

See also

• 2020 update #338
• 2019 update #290

[marcoscaceres]

Thanks @inexorabletash! this is great.