breaking change: removing WebSQL APIs

[sigmundch]

The WebSQL standard was abandoned more than 10 years ago and is not supported by many browsers.

The dart:web_sql library has been documented as unsupported and deprecated for several years as well and but wasn't annotated properly. Since Dart 2.14 dart:web_sql and the related window.openDatabase API exposed by dart:html have been marked deprecated.

We plan to completely remove these APIs in a future Dart release, likely in Dart 2.15.

What can break?

Any app that imports dart:web_sql or that uses window.openDatabase would start seeing compile-time errors.

Mitigation

The main mitigation is to remove any imports to dart:web_sql and uses of window.openDatabase.

We don't expect uses of these APIs though, given how the underlying functionality is missing in many browsers. If however, such uses exist (say for a chrome-only app), the recommendation is to switch to use either web storage or indexeddb.

We did a study in internal systems and in 15K external packages (using pub_crawl) and didn't find any relevant uses of these APIs. We found only two benign matches: one in a discontinued package, and one in a autogenerated library that mocks dart:html and reachable libraries.

@franklinyow @vsmenon @mit-mit @kevmoo

@grouma @Hixie - for approvals

[kevmoo]

👍

[grouma]

LGTM. I found no usages within AngularDart or any client code within Google.

[Hixie]

As the original author of the WebSQL proposal I heartily endorse this change.

[franklinyow]

ping: @mit-mit @vsmenon @kevmoo for approvals

[kevmoo]

Approved!

[vsmenon]

lgtm!

[grouma]

LGTM. I can't find any real usages of it in Google3.

[franklinyow]

Approved. Please add the proper Milestone for this.

[devoncarew]

@sigmundch - is this going out as part of 2.14 or 2.15?

[sigmundch]

2.15 - The deprecation of WebSQL went out in 2.14 (landed in d52475c1663). However the deletion of the APIs hasn't happened yet.

[mit-mit]

@sigmundch can you confirm that these are now fully removed?

[sigmundch]

Confirmed - the change that fully removed support for it (38b5a84) was released in 2.15.0. The only thing that remains is cleanup on our end, but that's not visible to external developers.