Comment by BMorearty
5 years ago
This is fantastically creative. And the author does a great job of starting out by describing why this is useful.
And then using SQLite to insert and update DOM elements? Holy cow, icing on the cake. Unlike the first part, there’s no explanation of why you’d want to do that. But by that point I was so drawn in that I didn’t care and was just enjoying the ride.
Yeaah I felt like at that point the article was already long enough so I didn't bother describing the DOM part too much - even though I spent more time implementing that than I did implementing the rest ;)
Basically SQLite has a virtual table mechanism [1] where you have to define a few functions that figure out how to scan your "fake" table / which indices to use and then how to read / write the actual data. I hook into this mechanism and redirect the request to DOM functions like querySelector() etc. Then there's the issue about SQLite being fully synchronous, but I have to run it in a WebWorker - and the WebWorker can't actually access the DOM and it can only communicate asynchronously with the main thread... So I have to do some weird stuff with SharedArrayBuffer and Atomics.wait to make that work [2].
[1] https://www.sqlite.org/vtab.html [2] https://github.com/phiresky/sql.js-httpvfs/blob/master/src/v...
"But by that point I was so drawn in that I didn’t care and was just enjoying the ride."
:-) There a high amount of SQLite content/articles/blogs on the web that can provide this effect. SQLite is to programmers like the stars are to astronomers. A wonder.