That Human Touch: Contact Manager and Client-Side Persistence

Abstract

We all know that storing information for any length of time in a relatively robust way will usually lead to a database of some sort. In web applications, storing state on the server, whether in a database or in a session, is pretty much expected of most applications. But what happens when you don’t have a persistence mechanism on the server or possibly don’t want one for some reason? What’s the alternative? You almost certainly know that storing nontransient information on the client leads most usually to cookies. We’ll be looking at cookies in just a little bit for sure. There is, however, another facility available (after a quick plug-in installation) in modern web browsers that is brought to us by our friends at Google, namely Gears. This storage mechanism is pretty quickly gaining a lot of popularity for very good reason, as we’ll soon see.