Peering Behind the Browser

I am excited to announce the beta availability of a new project from Sybase, UltraLiteWeb. UltraLiteWeb is a set of enhancements to the open source Gears project that aims to provide it with additional data management and synchronization capabilities.

Gears, an open source project first started a few years ago, was originally conceived to create more powerful web applications by enhancing browsers with new features and functionality. One of its original features was the ability for web applications to create local SQLite databases that it could use to store application data. However, one of the results of having web applications that can store local data is that you end up with multiple copies of the data that need to be resolved through synchronization. Unfortunately, the lack of integrated synchronization support within SQLite, along with the lack of encryption, makes it a difficult fit in enterprise scenarios.

UltraLiteWeb was designed to address these problems.

UltraLiteWeb is a patched build of Gears that enhances it by giving developers the option of using UltraLite as an alternative to SQLite. With UltraLiteWeb, developers can take advantage of the robust synchronization logic that is already integrated into UltraLite. By using UltraLiteWeb in conjunction with a MobiLink server, developers will be able to create robust, secure, data rich browser-based applications without needing to worry about all the complications of synchronization.

UltraLiteWeb introduces a new JavaScript API for communicating with the UltraLite databases that is unlike any of the other UltraLite APIs. This is because the UltraLiteWeb API is based off of the already existing Database API in Gears. A sample of the JavaScript API is shown below:

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// create database
var db = sybase.ultraliteweb.factory.create('beta.uldatabase');
var options = {
  case:       "Respect",  // make database case-sensitive
  page_size:  "8k",       // set 8kb page size
  date_order: "MDY"       // set date order to be Month-Day-Year
};
db.open('database-cars', options);

UltraLiteWeb is available in beta for Firefox on Windows and Linux, and Internet Explorer on Windows. For more information, take a look at the About and FAQ pages. The UltraLiteWeb code is available under the Apache 2 license.

If you have any questions or feedback about UltraLiteWeb, please feel free to post them on the SQL Anywhere Web Development forum.