Seven ways to stored data in local through Web application.

To develop Web application, especially for mobile web application, one question is often asked is how can I store data in local. Particularly, how can we store large size of data in local disk? My answer is there should be no problem to do this. There must be technique to solve this issue as there are demand from market. This post is a collection of local storage methods, which I can think so far.

1. HTTP cookies All developers know that HTTP cookies is designed to allow Web developer to store some data on browser side. But, it is also well know that its size limitation is small. The very cookies' maximum size could be different among different browsers. Maximum number of cookies may be different among different browsers. Using the number limitation of cookies per domain, we may find way to enlarge the imitation by deploy Web application among several servers having different Sub domain name.
2. Flah player Because of mean of cookie, web developer go to Flah player for larger local storage size. By default, Flash player embedded in a Browser has 1MB limitation of local storage. But, user can adjust it until unlimited. Ext JS 3.x uses Flash local storage too.
3. bookmarklet Since bookmarklet store javascript code locally, I can think that we can use it to pursue certain degree of local storage capability.
4. Web Cache By configure Web server, we can ask browser to cache certain content on client side. Here is an example from Sencha web site:
   Taking Sencha Touch Apps Offline
   
5. HTML 5 local storage A good news from HTML 5 is that HTML 5 compatible browser may support HTML 5 local storage. Its W3C recommended size limitation is 5M but some browser allow it be expandable.
6. Web SQL database To have even larger local storage, we can use Web SQL database. Here is a list of When can I use Web SQL Database?. Here is an example usage: http://rem.im/html5-tweet-time-range.html
   
7. Using Web browser wrapper Titanium and phoneGap are two popular web browser wrapper on mobile devices. Using this kind technology, the local storage space goes to almost unlimited.
   

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