Question

I am looking for optimal approach to use file system based data storage in Web Application.

Basically, I am developing a Google Chrome Extension, which is in fact a Content Script based. Its functionality is as follows:

1. The extension is a content script based one and it will be fired for each webpage user visits.

2. The extension will fetch some data continuously (every 5/10 seconds) from a database from a Cross-Browser Location (in JSON format) and display that data in the form of ticker at each webpage. Content Script will modify the DOM of web pages to display the ticker.

For above scheme, I have noticed a fact that the continuous fetching of data increases server’s and client’s bandwidth consumption a lot. Hence, I am planning for an approach to maintain the data in a file system, which will be bundled in the extension only and will be accessed locally to avoid bandwidth consumption.

The file system, I can maintain is text, CSV or even XML also. But the issue is that I need to read the data files through Javascript, JQuery or AJAX. All these languages are not having efficient file-handling and file access mechanisms.

Can anyone please suggest approach for optimum solution with file access-mechanisms for above problem?

Also, if you can suggest whole new approach other than File System based data storage, that will be really helpful to me.

Answer 1

If all you need is read some data from files then you can bundle those files with the extension.

In which format to store data in those files – I can think of 3 options:

• You can read XML files through XMLHttpRequest and parse them with jQuery. It is very easy and powerful with all jquery selectors at your disposal.
• You can store data in JSON format, read it the same way and parse it with JSON.parse()

• You can directly make javascript objects out of your data and simply include this file into your background page through <script src="local.js"> tag. So your local.js would look something like this:

  var data = [{obj1: "value1"}, ...];