Professional JavaScript for Web Developers, 4th Edition

25Client-Side Storage

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Cookies
• Browser storage APIs
• IndexedDB

WROX.COM DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

Please note that all the code examples for this chapter are available as a part of this chapter's code download on the book's website at www.wrox.com/go/projavascript4e on the Download Code tab.

Along with the emergence of web applications came a call for the ability to store user information directly on the client. The idea is logical: information pertaining to a specific user should live on that user's machine. Whether that is login information, preferences, or other data, web application providers found themselves searching for ways to store data on the client. The first solution to this problem came in the form of cookies, a creation of the old Netscape Communications Corporation and described in a specification titled Persistent Client State: HTTP Cookies (still available at http://curl.haxx.se/rfc/cookie_spec.html). Today, cookies are just one option available for storing data on the client.

COOKIES

HTTP cookies, commonly just called cookies, were originally intended to store session information on the client. The specification called for the server to send a Set-Cookie HTTP header containing session information as part of any response to an HTTP request. For instance, the headers of a server response may look like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-type: text/html
Set-Cookie: name=value
Other-header: other-header-value

This HTTP response sets a ...