GSoC 2014 week 6

First, I was really glad to received the email saying that I got through the mid-term evaluation. I need to thank my mentor Madhura Jayarathne for the guidance provided and all others, supported through the mailing list, to achieve this milestone.

During the mid evaluation period, I did some more improvements in the exporting functionality based on the review comments. Also in the show/hide tables in the designer view.

The major task for this few weeks is to enhance the usability of the designer. That is, to use the designer, users need to do some configurations explicitly, which, most of the time, will not be done by the users, hence these funcationalities will never be used.

So the main goal of this task is to provide a mechanism in such a way that, users will not need to configure anything, but still should be able to use the designer. For that "Client side databases" will be used.

After analyzing currently available technologies:

• Web storage
• Web Sql database
• Indexed database

are the most commonly used. Web storage uses a "key-value" pair method to store objects in the browser. Although it's a simple mechanism, It's performance decreases as the data become large and complex. Web Sql database is a normal "SQL" - relational database, and has good performance even for the large data sets. But because of low agility and being deprecated, users are moving away from that.

On the other hand Indexed database is made up by combining all the strengths of both web-storage and Web Sql databases. So its more powerful than any of the above two. Also its browser compatibility is increasing.