>>Hmm, I missed the bit about the HTML5 persistent storage PR blitz, is there an executive summary somewhere?
>
>Google for the decision of Firefox not to support WebSQL and the day job of the committer who
>gave them the IndexedDB on BerkelyDB (Hint: who owns it ?)...
>I am sooo glad they saved me from the dangers of using a single SQL caching client layer
>on the probably most used database tool in the world (which is used in Tunderbird for neraly all stuff)
>and try to force me into ORM Key-Value rubbish on disk as well.

>Yuck. Hope many Oracle/SQLServer licenses will be exchanged/saved by going NoSQL in backends
>as there is better/more natural support for such structures in browsers now.

Interesting licensing for BerkleyDB: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_DB#Licensing : "Give the world your source, or give us big $$". Sounds like Oracle, trying to encumber a new standard.

>>UPDATE: there seem to be a couple of APIs, "Web SQL Database" and "Indexed Database API". The former seems to be moribund, don't know about the latter. The first articles I've seen about them discuss SQLite rather than MySQL.
>>
>>Side issue, since you mentioned web-based being "noticeably slower than native apps": I wonder what is considered "fast enough", these days. Years ago I remember hearing that a response time of 2 seconds was considered "fast enough". It's probably faster today. After all, we have a civic duty to reduce car crashes etc. due to inappropriate apping/texting etc. :-/
>
>Target: 100ms, with outliers falling under 200ms that is for a "reactive app".
>Otherwise 1 sec to keep train of thought (or lowered attention span of today's kids).
>After 7-10 secs user will work on something else.
>Opinioated Source: Google in talks on optimizing GWT JAVA>>JS Compiler and Minifier

I don't see how web apps could hope to reach 100ms, a round-trip on a fast, uncongested network has more than that in just latency, a real-world network might see longer latency than that on just one leg. So if you really need that kind of responsiveness, apps will be the only way to go, for the foreseeable future.