Windows 8 Application Development with HTML5 For Dummies

Chapter 12

Keeping Local Storage

In This Chapter

Storing settings

Making use of SQLite

Storing things in the file system

One of the most interesting things about the Windows 8 platform, as far as systems architecture goes, is that you can’t do what Microsoft products have been best at for years — connect to a SQL Server.

You heard that right. Because the socket-level connection capability has been seriously constrained in Windows Store apps, you can’t connect to an external database. That means that the standard forms-over-data approach to programming that was fostered in a large way by Visual Basic back in the ’80s is . . . well . . . dead.

What’s replacing it? All data should have a service over it. Most of the bad programs out there are bad because the application developer had direct access to a database. It’s just too easy to make bad choices when that is possible.

And now, it isn’t possible anymore, at least for Windows Store apps. If you want to build an app that uses real data — like an enterprise reporting app, or something like that — you have to get the data from some service layer.

That said, three significant sources of data are permissible and shouldn’t be ignored: ...