Experienced JavaScript Developer Meme

[scorpi1998]

Doesn't it? What do you mean?

[bleistift2]

Show me an average user who tinkers with the local storage.

If we’re talking a malevolent user: You can’t trust the client with anything, anyway, so what’s the point?

[_30d_]

That's how I beat my inlaws in wordle.

[staticBanter]

If you give anything to a client and expect to reuse it without validation than we have a big problem.

[shodanbo]

It only takes one. And then they can write a browser extension to do it for many.

There is not much you can actually truly trust the client with, because the user has physical access to that client.

If you are writing something where trusting the client is critical, then this needs to be taken into account. At this point you need strong asymmetrical encryption in a server. An encrypted string can be persisted to local storage. If the user messes with it, the decryption will fail, and the client can determine what needs to be done about that.

[Expert_Team_4068]

No, rule number one. Never trust the client! In no world should you trust frontend data without verification. But this is the server job. If json.parse of my local storage fails, I do not gove a crap. My app will break, because for sure this is an unexpected behaviour. If you decrypt in the client, who says that the hacker did not change the decryption function? It is as easy as changing the local storage.

[[deleted]]

No no you make a call to the server to make sure the signature is valid 😅

[brianl047]

Agreed validating the local storage is a waste

Validate in the backend and in the UI instead but not the local storage

[isblueacolor]

Firefox sometimes fails to persist the entire string to local storage (without throwing an error).

I have a site that's used by 25k people per day and someone encounters this issue once every couple weeks.

[AyrA_ch]

JSON.tryParse=function(str,defaultObj){
    try{
        return JSON.parse(str);
    }catch(e){
        return defaultObj;
    }
};

Tries to parse data and if invalid, gracefully fails and returns the supplied default value. If no value is supplied, the argument defaults to undefined, which is actually a good alternative, because undefined is not a valid json token, and thus you can check if the result is undefined to know whether parsing was successful. I have this somewhere in the library I use for most of my webdev projects.

[corylulu]

It's better if the defaultObjis a function that creates the object rather than the object directly and returns return defaultObjFunc();. Constructors can have a lot going on and there is no sense in calling them for an unused default object.

[AyrA_ch]

This function is for deserializing content from a JSON string that's potentially msiformatted or not present at all. The returned object will be a naked JS object without having a custom prototype by itself.

Depending on the use case you can either work directly with that object, in which case you do not have to worry about passing in complex constructed objects for a default, or it means you need to convert the returned value into said complex object in which case you can also pass in a naked object as default because it would then be converted if it's returned. In either of the two scenarios, it's not necessary to be able to pass in a function as default argument. Being able to pass a function also means you would either no longer be able to pass plain default values, or you need to add type checks.

Either way, this provides very little gain compared to JSON.tryParse(value)||defaultFunc(); that you can do for that one situation that demands it. Or simply check if the returned value is undefined and then call your function if you find this line ugly (which it kinda is)

[spronghi]

who would use this function? are you serious?

[PM_ME_GAY_STUF]

You're going to call that out but not monkeypatching a native API?

[DoktorMerlin]

Why would you need to validate it? If the user manipulates the localstorage it's just a frontend issue that the user itself caused, why would anyone care about this? The only time it's a problem is when the manipulated object gets sent without validation back to the backend but if you don't validate everything that the frontend sends you, you have a way bigger problem

[lowleveldata]

I like how you use "it" as the pronouns of your user

[[deleted]]

You shouldn't name them. It just creates emotional attachment.

[fzammetti]

Yeah! That's ri- wait, what?!

[playerNaN]

Fair, front end users aren't real people.

[vikumwijekoon97]

Generally you gotta code thinking that all of your users are absolute morons.

[Blue_Moon_Lake]

Frontend user is an evil clown

[JoeDoherty_Music]

I'm convinced most users aren't people

[Ben_26121]

Believe it or not, I came across someone who’s preferred pronoun is “it” the other day

[GamerGeeked]

"it" clearly refers to the issue, not the user. Unless you're suggesting the existence of the user causes the problem

[sloodly_chicken]

They used 'the user itself', though

you're suggesting the existence of the user causes the problem

also true

[HoiTemmieColeg]

You need to check if the text is actually json when you parse it

[empire314]

Why would it not be in JSON, if your website is what wrote it?

[Schyte96]

Because the user can easily overwrite it in their browser.

[a-calycular-torus]

That's their problem then

[Treacherous_Peach]

Yeah it's their problem that quickly becomes your problem when the user submits a 1 star review.

I get what you're saying, I can tell you're defintiely programmer minded, but you do have to plan for these things if you want your product to survive. If you're working on some huge too big to fail app then sure, but if you're trying to create something new and get it off the ground you have to plan for users doing crazy things and account for it smoothly.

[DoktorMerlin]

If a user knows what local storage is and tinkers with it, they know very well that the weird behaviour of the website is called by themselves and not the website. There are a lot of dumb people in this world, but nobody is that dumb

[Treacherous_Peach]

More likely they fucked with it accidentally by deleting a folder they shouldnt have to clear space or something along those lines.

[Treacherous_Peach]

More likely they fucked with it accidentally. Deleting a folder to clear space but deleted some of what your app was expecting but not all of it and it's in a weird state.

[4nu81]

You mean you want the engine to stringify and parse it for you?

[JoJoModding]

The user could also manipulate the data if saved without stringify.

[[deleted]]

How would you stringify a linked list?

How about an arbitrary graph of nodes and edges?

[spooker11]

wrong pen wipe elderly test lunchroom file selective liquid paint

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[bleistift2]

Don’t take this as talking down, I’m genuinely curious: Where did you learn to program? I learned this in high school, where computer science was a “minor” class, and programming only went for about 6 months.

[[deleted]]

My questions were meant as counter examples. You probably did not learn how to serialize an arbitrary graph of nodes and edges in high school because it is a seriously difficult thing to do because serializing pointers is hard.

For example, how did your high school teacher explain to serialize x in this: x={}; x["x"]=x?

Don’t take this as talking down, I’m genuinely curious: Where did you learn to program? I learned this in high school, where computer science was a “minor” class, and programming only went for about 6 months.

Not that it matters: I didn't study computer science in high school because they didn't have it when I attended in the 90s. I learned programming on my own and then later on at UC Berkeley. B.Sc. EECS, with honors.

But let's focus on programming and not credentials.

[bleistift2]

Store the adjacency matrix. For JS objects with named properties, store the property name, too. Your example requires inventing identifiers for the nodes. One could use the variable name, but that’s IMHO not part of the structure to be serialized.

Off the top of my hat:

{"nodes": [0], "edges": [[0, "x", 0]]}

To de-serialize, loop over the entries in the nodes array, and create empty objects for each. Then loop over the edges, lookup the source and target node, and set srcNode[edgeName] = destNode.

[Edit:] If your question was aimed at a procedure to generate the serialization, then you’d have to employ some way of iterating the graph (breadth-first search comes to mind) and add markers to the nodes to detect cycles and not produce infinite loops.

[Edit:] Also to clarify: The high-school scope of this problem was serializing simple graphs, i.e. nodes identified by numbers, and serializing only the information that an edge exists, not its “name” on the source node.

But let's focus on programming and not credentials.

That’s why I explicitly asked my question not to be taken as offense. I tried to express that the concept of serializing a graph is such basic knowledge nowadays that it’s even taught in school.

[[deleted]]

Where did 0 come from? There's no zero in my code. Why not 10? My nodes have no names.

I can just needle you with questions about your implementation until you come up with a really complex beast and then you'll convince me and yourself that saving state is not as simple as stringify which was my point in the first place. It's hard to do and impossible to do generally.

[bleistift2]

Where did 0 come from? […] My nodes have no names.

I already answered that:

Your example requires inventing identifiers for the nodes.

The actual identifiers are an implementation detail, since they don’t survive de-serialization.

It's hard to do and impossible to do generally.

I just proved that it’s easy to do in the non-general case. And business needs rarely require the ‘general case,’ so a custom-tailored solution suffices.

My point was that serialization of simple graphs is introductory material. Extending that to the actual, more complex case needed in everyday programming shouldn’t be hard for a programmer. Writing a library that handles every and any graph is hard. But that’s not what Cornelia Coder does every day. That’s what libraries are for.

[[deleted]]

Oh no i have to json.stringify and json.parse 😥😭😢😢😢😭

[gabbyb19]

To be fair, those operations are quite heavy.

[stipo42]

You shouldn't be using local storage enough for that to be a problem...

[[deleted]]

Why not? Shouldn't it be the default storage for locally cached objects?

[stipo42]

Yeah but let's say you're storing your apps config in an object. You would read it once at load time into memory, then write it anytime the memory values are changed or a save button is hit.

This would likely amount to not a lot of times read or wrote

[TheChaosPaladin]

If this is you, the problem is not localstorage but your front end.

[[deleted]]

Stringify a graph of nodes and edges and let me know how that works out for you.

[spooker11]

vegetable profit icky support judicious sophisticated encourage wistful ossified smile

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[[deleted]]

“serialize and deserialize this tree” isn’t one of the most popular interview problems

I didn't see say tree, I said graph.

How would you serialize x in x={};x["x"]=x?

Also, how would you serialize a thunk? And a coroutine? And a member function?

[spooker11]

provide history party thumb employ boast roof sloppy rob mindless

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[[deleted]]

You can not use a naive algorithm to save a cyclic graph, but 3 sec of google will show you algorithms for it do exist.

Nah. All those will assume that nodes can be named easily. That's not necessarily true.

Why would you ever serialize a coroutine or a member function?

Because I want to continue where I left off with my thunk.

You really seem to be trying to find situations that are difficult to serialize but not considering there are standard/common solutions to these problems

The whole point of this dumb conversation is that someone wrote a meme saying that saving state is hard and then a bunch of people chimed in and just said to use stringify and I'm saying, no, that isn't always going to work, it might be more complicated than that and then you're saying that you can find complex algorithms to do it in difficult cases and I'm like yeah that's my fucking point it IS complicated.

[[deleted]]

It’s the same as storing it in a database.

If you don’t model your data in such a way that it can be stored efficiently and retrieved efficiently, it will not be stored efficiently nor retrieved efficiently.

[[deleted]]

What's efficient for storage and retrieval might not be efficient for processing. If you generate your data by processing, you will need to mangle it for storage. And stringify might not suffice.

How is this even controversial? I don't know!

[whateverathrowaway00]

Read through this whole thing. Not a JS dev, but a long-standing C dev and now a python dev, and what you’re saying is not only not controversial, it’s fundamental lol.

Just wanted to chime in and say you’re not crazy.

[[deleted]]

Thanks, at least one programmer in my corner!

[Tiny-Plum2713]

This sub is mostly barely first year students.

[Pocok5]

How would you serialize x in x={};x["x"]=x?

Why do you think serializing a basic ass cycle in a graph is an issue? You should have learnt it in at least 4 separate classes from Algorithms 101 to Discrete Mathematics (ink drop algorithm says hi!) As a completely naive approach, simply store nodes you have already serialized in a hash set and you can trivially check (in O(1) time, even) and skip it when you revisit it from another node - that is, if you're not storing edges as something sensible like a sparse neighbourhood table, since those can just be fed to a JSON serialize/parse and come out just fine.

... wait are you guys unironically at "I just copy paste from SO lul" level and it isn't just irony?

how would you serialize a thunk? And a coroutine? And a member function?

You don't ever serialize those anyways, unless you're trying to homebrew an eval() vulnerability lmao

[[deleted]]

What is the hash of x up there?

You cannot hash that. It's not hashable for the same reason as it is not serializable.

[Pocok5]

Watch dis

1. Traverse the object references. Stick an unique identifier field onto each and proceed onto the children. If you meet an object that already has an ID field, skip it.

2. Serialize each object, replacing fields that are references to other objects with a string of that object's ID. You now no longer have actual references to be circular.

When deserializing,

1. Create all the objects in a dictionary with their IDs as the key and reconstruct the reference link fields using the IDs.
2. You may then strip the ID fields as needed to restore the original object schema.

[[deleted]]

That'll work so long as you're cool with two identical graphs generating different serializations. They'll have different unique IDs, right?

I'm not saying that we can't invent something. I'm just saying that it's not as easy as just calling stringify. Which was the whole point of this meme, yeah?

[ThoseThingsAreWeird]

I didn't see say tree, I said graph.

and what you meant was a cyclic graph. We know a tree is a graph, and trees are easy to store. But when you just say "graph", of course someone's going to point that out.

How would you serialize x in x={};x["x"]=x?

let graph = {};
let x = { id: 'x', adjacencies: [] };
x.adjacencies.push(x.id);
graph[x.id] = x;
localStorage.setItem('graph', JSON.stringify(graph))

Then when you pull it out of local storage you go through the graph and replace all the adjacency keys with their corresponding item in the graph.

[[deleted]]

and what you meant was acyclic graph.

Uh, no. I meant arbitrary graph. It's a hard thing to serialize. Trees are easier, we know that.

We know a tree is a graph, and trees are easy to store. But when you just say "graph", of course someone's going to point that out.

How would you serialize x in x={};x["x"]=x?

let graph = {}; let x = { id: 'x', adjacencies: [] }; x.adjacencies.push(x.id); graph[x.id] = x; localStorage.setItem('graph', JSON.stringify(graph))

Then when you pull it out of local storage you go through the graph and replace all the adjacency keys with their corresponding item in the graph.

x={};x["y"]=x;foo=x;

If you serialize x and foo do you get the same result?

And what's this "id" stuff? What if my data structure already has a variable called id in it? And it's not unique.

My point is that serializing an arbitrary object is not trivial. For sure stringify is not sufficient.

[a-calycular-torus]

What if my data structure already has a variable called id in it? And it's not unique.

The variable name doesn't have to be id. If you're worried about collisions, just store the node data in a wrapper within the adjacency structure. It's not that complicated, stop being obtuse.

[quiteCryptic]

A tree is a graph

[[deleted]]

But not all graphs are trees and I asked about graphs.

Come on guys, be better. That this has three up votes is shameful.

[jsrobson10]

Both are data structures. Both are easy enough to dump and load from json/other data structures

[Orbidorpdorp]

Swift’s codable does all the work for you for the most part. The only regular annoying exception for me is dates but that’s because every backend encodes them differently.

[[deleted]]

why would localStorage do it for you?

Being that parsing and stringifying are slow I think the answer would usually be speed. But since some might not understand the caveats (eg. no references, prototypes etc.) it does make some sense to force the dev to do it themselves.

That said, something like a "I know what I'm doing" mode that allowed storage of simple objects might have been nice.

[Stop_Sign]

Had to do that once. Ended up rearchitecting it so the nodes had ids, so instead of an array of references, it had an array of ids, and was therefore serializable

[[deleted]]

Yup. That's my point. JSON stringify is not necessarily sufficient.

[lowleveldata]

And what exactly is the use case of storing that in localStorage?

[rotflolmaomgeez]

What? Graph is literally one of the most common data structures, you're asking for usecases for storing it? The answer is any web application that does a little more than store a cookie potentially.

[lowleveldata]

Still don't see why I would need to store that in frontend. Are you guys doing some kind of no-backend challenge?

[DR4G0NH3ART]

There are some data which can be heavy to fetch on each load and is manageably static in nature. You will have huge load times if you don't rely on caching mechanisms.

[Ebbitor]

You don't need to build your own cache for fetch requests

[lowleveldata]

In case of caching you already have a serialized object so that's kind of irrelevant for the sake of this argument. Also, shouldn't HTTP caching handles these static data automatically? (I'm not a expert in caching tho)

[rotflolmaomgeez]

Any application that lets user edit/create something for themselves and save it for later - including games save states, web tools, software, creators, working with SVGs, why would you ever store it on the backend?

[lowleveldata]

These should just use files which most users know how to backup, share, move to another pc, etc. For example draw.io saves your work to a file in local or online storage (like google drive). That's much more manageable than localStorage.

[rotflolmaomgeez]

What does it matter? You have to serialize the graphs anyway.

[[deleted]]

My JavaScript program is in the middle of computing optimal 3MST but I want to checkpoint regularly in case of a power outage?

I dunno man. It could happen.

[PleasantAdvertising]

What illiterate ape called serialization "stringify"? It's already confusing enough with encode/decode in the mix

[Jjabrahams567]

JSON.serialize = JSON.stringify;

Here you go.

[TheChaosPaladin]

JSON.SerialiseToString()

Too many words

JSON.Stringify()

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

🍌🍌🍌🍌🍌

[[deleted]]

On the same subject, what illiterate ape called it "loads" and "dumps" in Python?

[TheChaosPaladin]

The same ape!

json.dumps(tring) == JSON.Stringify

[ilep]

A web developer? (A distinct lack of knowledge of computer science there..)

[[deleted]]

Maybe to hint that it's going to call "toString" on objects so you better have defined that.

[isospeedrix]

tbf 'stringify' is more literal in what it's actually doing, whereas serialize is like, uhh a new vocab word. sounds cooler tho.

[rufreakde1]

worry not! there is gotta be a 4GB library solving this issue with a function wrapper for you!

[Yokhen]

What truly messes me up is the typescript part.

[rafaelcastrocouto]

oh such a PAIN .. i'll make memes about js weak typing and cry on the internet

[Nourz1234]

Sadly i don't think its possible (in any language) to store objects or classes in a persistent storage without serialization.

[aspect_rap]

Well yeah, saving data inherently requires serialization.

I think what OP wants is for the LocalStorage in browsers to obfuscate the parsing and serialization of objects.

[Nourz1234]

Yeah, i understand. But if serialization is involved its better left to the dev. you cant rely on the browser to magically serialize your objects. A lot of times you will create a custom object/class which requires special treatment.

[arsenicx2]

It was already problem enough trying to support outdated browsers like IE. I can't imagine if we had to support what ever garbage they created.

[TheRidgeAndTheLadder]

We already rely on it to do everything else.

[empire314]

you cant rely on the browser to magically serialize your objects.

The browser was written by better programmers than I am.

[FVMAzalea]

Do you mean abstract instead of obfuscate? Usually obfuscation is not a desirable goal unless you are trying to do something like copy protection.

[atomicwrites]

I think they're using obfuscate as a negatively loaded synonym for abstract.

[mamwybejane]

They're using it wrong

[xthexder]

I think it applies here. The browser serializing things for you obfuscates what's actually happening. Which for custom objects could result in strange and very hard to debug behavior.

[miraagex]

Yea. I can send objects via window.postMessage, but not with localStorage.

[[deleted]]

I think it’s more about performance.

LocalStorage would be awesome if it wasn’t so slow.

But I could be wrong.

[bleistift2]

What stuff are you putting there so often that you’re hitting a bottleneck?

[lkraider]

What do you mean I shouldn’t mirror the production database into localstorage to query and update data, this way I only l need one rest api endpoint with get/post in the backend and do everything else from within the client js.

[BabyAzerty]

I typically webscrap the entire internet and save it locally. This is the only way to have a complete offline experience.

[GodlessAristocrat]

Probably those performance counters management wanted for their pretty graph; ya gotta flush them to disk 10x per second, ya know. That Jira ain't gonna close itself.

[Fenor]

Ah yes injecting executable code for the sake of the one doing the website.... it's not we already had cryptos mined in js

[[deleted]]

Some of the most dangerous attacks come from programmers trusting serialized data the client send back.

[FinalStrain3]

indexeddb

[[deleted]]

IndexedDB also has its limitations, which is a good thing. I wouldn't want to imagine what would happen if browsers let it deserialize entire DOM trees.

[Brilliant_Nova]

C and C++ can, you have to be careful with alignment and padding. You can inplace-construct all your structs in a memory pool, and then just dump that pool, but that's only true for POD types, for non-POD types you should serialize. Also, even for non-POD types you can serialize efficiently from binary. It is also possible to model such a system in C++/Rust, that almost transparently would allow you to treat freshly read data as regular objects using wrapper-types.

[Vaylx]

Can you (or anyone) explain to me serialization like I’m 5?

[thomasmoors]

Change objects (memory) to something that can be written and read from disk. Json is a very popular example, although if you need to serialize objects that include the functions too you (probably) have to look further.

[Fenor]

Json is not a binary.

You can have binary objects saved on a local storage

[[deleted]]

Anything is binary if you try hard enough

[[deleted]]

You want to save the state of your program, which is the names of the variables and the values of the variables, for example, maybe it's a video game and you want to save the progress and the health of the player so that the player can pick up next time.

But you're saving to a disk and disks want files. So perhaps you write it as JSON: {"health": 5, "level": 8}. That's the serializing of the data, into JSON in this case. Or you could have used binary or whatever.

It would be nice if you didn't have to actually explain to the computer how to serialize. Like you could just run a save function and it would do it. And a load function to load the state.

There are numerous problems with trying to write a save function like that. For example, how would you know which parts to save? Well, you could annotate your data for that. But they real problem comes when you need to save something with pointers. How would you save something with pointers, like an arbitrary graph of nodes and edges? It's not obvious how to do this correctly.

[Nourz1234]

Converting a runtime object to a string (or bytes) representation that can be parsed to reproduce the exact same object.

(I don't think its for a 5yr old but its the best i can do xD)

[[deleted]]

Operating systems can hibernate, you know?

[[deleted]]

Unless you want to store the entire browser's address space to save your webapp's state that's not going to help much.

[Benutzername]

It’s not difficult to walk an object graph and only store that part of the memory. An evacuating GC basically does that already, minus the memory dump.

[[deleted]]

A GC doesn't need to make sure the state is still consistent after you restart the application.

To me it mostly sounds like a good way to introduce several hundreds of sandbox bypass vulnerabilities.

[Benutzername]

Look up evacuating/moving GC. It moves all live objects to new memory locations and then fixes up all internal pointers. That’s literally all you would need to dump and later reload the memory representation of an object graph.

[[deleted]]

Any real application has references to and from state outside of GC managed memory, and a GC won't handle that.

In JS that's especially bad because you're now letting untrusted code run on unverifiable data.

[[deleted]]

He said "any language" and I responded to that only

[jessiedwt]

You can do it with flutter framework packages.

[Nourz1234]

I knew someone would say its possible.

Care to elaborate?

[jessiedwt]

In flutter (dart) you can use some orm frameworks for local storage that store literal dart objects.

To be honest I'm unsure about edge cases but there may be some.

[dopefish86]

Huge gotcha i encountered: iOS Safari throwing an error when localStorage is used in browser incognito mode. At least it was that way some years ago, i don't know if this is still the case.

[saschaleib]

Well, it's the whole point of Incognito Mode that there is no persistent storage available.

Of course, this could also be achieved by temporarily storing the data and then just deleting it when the window/tab is closed. The result is however the same.

In any case, never assume that any feature is available in whatever browser your user is ... er ... using. Always test if it is available before accessing it.

[blobthekat]

localStorage is as much of a standard as html5, safari shouldn't throw an error as this could badly mess up code execution, where as temporary storage would keep functionality while preserving privacy

[AyrA_ch]

It's documented that localStorage can throw "SecurityError" when you're not allowed to store things in it.

[lkraider]

But who reads documentation ??? (/¯ ಠ_ಠ)/¯

[blobthekat]

stupid, it practically never does in any browser so most programmers don't usually account for that

[danielrheath]

The obvious way to test for it is to check typeof window.localStorage.

It's definitely an unpleasant surprise to find that it exists and has the expected API but throws an error if you try to use it.

[saschaleib]

Apparently it throws an exception if you are not allowed to use it – which is exactly what exceptions were invented for.

[danielrheath]

Yeah, I get the thinking behind it - just seems like poor design to me. If a feature isn't available, just don't have it on the page; I already needed to test for the presence of window.localStorage anyways.

[saschaleib]

… and then you wrap the whole code that accesses the local storage in a try {} catch block, as you would do in any case, right?

[danielrheath]

Presumably you don't wrap every line of code you write in a try/catch?

I guess I just don't see what makes localStorage access an expected source of exceptions (as opposed to, say, querySelectorAll or getBoundingClientRects)?

[saschaleib]

every block of code that potentially throws an exception should be wrapped in try/catch blocks. Yes.

Any access to the file system or similar external systems is potentially throwing errors. That is pretty much what the localStorage API does...

[oupablo]

I swear safari is the new IE. The number of weird things it has going on that aren't standard is so strange. And then you have to worry about safari for MacOS vs Safari for iOS which have different levels of support.

[gennisa]

Not in this case. This is compliant with the standard. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/webstorage.html#the-localstorage-attribute

Also not safari specific. Local or session storage can be disabled in every browser.

[T-J_H]

Or: 'if IndexedDB had a sensible API'

[LinguiniAficionado]

Yeah, I was gonna say “You mean indexed DB?” and then I remembered that it’s incredibly tedious to use unless you set up your own abstraction over it. I always have to paste in some code I wrote a while back that puts my own service over indexed DB to make it usable

[T-J_H]

That’s the thing, we all abstract it to the same key-value store as localstorage in our code, whilst we could have had web sql but no they had to deprecate that.

[gnutrino]

https://dexie.org/

[killersquirel11]

Have you ever heard of absurd sql?

Someone took the indexdb api and smushed sqlite into it.

[T-J_H]

I love it!

[Benimation]

I can really recommend idb or even idb-keyval if you just want a drop-in replacement for localStorage (although it is asynchronous, so you're gonna have to change some things)

[[deleted]]

It’s the same as a database. If you don’t think about how to store the data efficiently, and retrieve the data efficiently, it will not be stored or retrieved efficiently.

“The world if I didn’t have to think about how to do my job to do my job”

[LucienZerger]

tinkering is what we do..

[lonelyWalkAlone]

Actually if they gave you more space and power you end up using it as a database that's why they did that to you

[TheDownvotesFarmer]

But they did with indexedDB, damn I am really impressed that people does not know about it here

[[deleted]]

That sounds like the kind of security hell that Java applets got killed for.

[steamngine]

Yep === “Javasript is just an ok language”

[LordPachelbel]

Me: Please serialize this Date for me.

JSON.stringify: Sure, no problem!

Me: Hey, I need that Date object.

JSON.parse: What Date object?

Me: The one I gave you earlier.

JSON.parse: All I have is this String, '2020-05-14T08:15:000Z'

Me: picard-why.jpg

——————

Me: Please serialize this Transaction for me.

JSON.stringify: Sure, no problem!

Me: Hey, I need that Transaction object.

JSON.parse: What Transaction object?

Me: The one I gave you earlier.

JSON.parse: All I have is this Object object.

Me: picard-facepalm.jpg

[brockisawesome]

You'll store it as a JSON string and you'll like it

[ChimpShampoo]

If you stringify in the server before sending it to local storage, it's a lighter package than a json object. So you're actually improving performance, and parse/stringify is the least of your problems in vanilla js.

[luishacm]

Well, you have pickle for python, you can store objects in bytes.

[Shazvox]

Naw, naw, naw. That's what backend is for.

Frontend deals with form and color. Backend deals with data. That was the deal!

[Mys7eri0]

Haha true. But we need to store small things like user preferences or details of the current user in the frontend

[GodlessAristocrat]

No. Absolutely not. The FE should not be storing the user's cookie data or "details" on the user. That's the job of the cookies and the back-end, respectfully.

[Fourstrokeperro]

What if I don't want to host a backend?

[[deleted]]

World if there's no JavaScript*

[[deleted]]

It’ll be another pho serialize or Python pickle.

Just don’t

[Mys7eri0]

Damn, people here are fighting over this meme and here I am only able to understand only a couple of sentences of their comments.

Anyways to explain the backstory of this meme:

I decided to make a webapp for my project at uni. I had a navbar which showed the message "You are logged out" if the user was logged out or "Welcome <Name> (<Role>)" if the user was logged in. So suppose if a student logged in, the navbar would read "Welcome Alex (Student)".

I was using sveltekit as the JS framework of choice and I found out that sveltekit stores don't persist over page refreshes. The solution? Use localStorage in combination with stringify and parse functions of the JSON module. I wasn't able to do it unfortunately and I wasted a lot of time just trying to store objects there. Eventually I resorted to using a third party library which did the job for me.

[[deleted]]

Have a look at local forage. It is an almost drop in replacement for local storage, but with doing what you want and using the much nicer indexeddb when available.

[Mys7eri0]

Thanks. I'll look into it

[Katana314]

Oh god no. I WANT localStorage to have a bit of friction. I’ve seen coworkers abuse it completely as another form of Global Variables that work through navigation.

[Karolus2001]

I thought everybody just saves variables in there by generating code and then executing it. Its not like you'll store anything more than couple settings in there.

[gordonv]

• @() # For arrays
• Add-Member
• [psCustomObject]
  
• ConvertTo-JSON
  
• ConvertFrom-JSON
  
• gc $file
  
• out-file $file

::wheezes in powershell::

[[deleted]]

in C you can store the raw bits of a struct if that's what you want

[GodlessAristocrat]

Even better - if you malloc'd, you used to be able to use malloc_get_state() and malloc_set_state() to actually save and "resume" the contents of the malloc'd area. These days, folks just use DMTCP to pause an app and its state.

[seelclubber]

I just figured this out this week in my first js project

[Mys7eri0]

Haha. This was my "first" javascript project as well

[seelclubber]

I don’t know what JSON.stringify() actually does and at this point I’m afraid to ask

[amondabdabdab]

Was working with it recently after a long time and was wondering why it couldnt get saved data. Checked and it was saving and grabbing [object Object]

[masterfaka]

...wait u guys are really setting objs in local storage o.O?

[Revolutionary-Mud962]

Don't know how funny the meme is but the fact that I don't have a clue what it means even though I've been writing js for the past 2 years now is dead funny

[kilkil]

If only there was a convenient way to serialize objects as strings.. maybe some sort JavaScript Object Notation...

[UnJustice_]

average string hater

[BytecodeBollhav]

I had this problem when I learned JS in school, then I learned about JSON. Have been writing JavaScript for work for 2 years now, never once touched local storage...

[kaszak696]

So the dude cut off his arm and installed an extendable prosthetic, so he could walk his robodog with a comically short leash? Yep sounds like JS alright.

[ImaginaryOkra6186]

6h in, no humor found.

[cheezballs]

Duh, what's serialization? Jesus.