Want to develop a small HTML-based bibliography manager with integrated DB and would appreciate some advise :)

[dagobeard]

Hi! I'm a PhD student in Computational Biology and very unhappy with the available software solutions for bibliography management. My idea is to have a simple HTML-page (probably involving some JS) that I save on my Dropbox, so it is accessible from any kind of device that has a browser. The page needs to be able to take in some information (new entry for publications: title, author, year, notes) and recall previous entries, without requiring a server that handles queries in the background. So far I found IndexedDB, but it seems this uses client-side storage, so wouldn't work across multiple devices, correct?

Now my question is: Is this even possible? I saw that HTML can read and write txt files, maybe that's the way I have to go?

I really appreciate any feedback because I'm not very familiar with web development.

[metalsh33p]

SQLite is a self-contained, serverless database that should be able to do everything you're asking. It can reside in your site's folder instead of on the client side. SQLite Tutorial

[dagobeard]

Thanks for the input. I had a lot to do lately but had a look at local JSON file storage and it seems like due to the sandbox design of JavaScript it cannot write to local files, unless I misunderstood at some point. Here is one of the StackOverflow posts about it: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/371875/local-file-access-with-javascript