Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Datastore API (beta)

dropbox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 88 posts

Re: Datastore API (beta)

#51

Post by r00fus »

oellegaard wrote: post #12

Such an awesome idea. However, in light of the recent events the first thing to come up in my mind when I see "datastore" and a US corporation is "PRISM integration". I'd like to see proper encryption of Dropbox as the next feature, so that we - innocent users- are not uploading our data to the US government.

Sadly, you're going to need to encrypt before uploading. Just as the webserver should never trust the client, the user should never trust the server with sensitive data.

Try boxcryptor - works with more than just Dropbox.

Re: Datastore API (beta)

#55

Post by joeblau »

modarts wrote: post #52

Why would I use this over something like Parse?

I haven't looked into it but it may be cheaper. That being said, both Parse and Azure support more platforms than this offering. I think that even Firebase has an service in this space as well.

Re: Datastore API (beta)

#56

Post by jimbokun »

"List – A special value that can contain other values, though not other lists."

https://www.dropbox.com/developers/datastore/tutorial/ios#re...

Seems like a very significant limitation. No mechanism for storing hierarchical data structures. For example, this is certainly not capable of storing arbitrary JSON data as a Record.

Re: Datastore API (beta)

#57

Post by sankethkatta »

fireboi wrote: post #53

are there any kind souls that could help please explain the difference between dropbox datastore, firebase and parse? thank you.

In comparison to firebase, this solves the offline sync problem, if your user is offline, you can still save to dropbox datastore locally, when you get a connection, it will automatically sync and take care of conflict resolution.

Re: Datastore API (beta)

#58

Post by JosephRedfern »

varenc wrote: post #44
JosephRedfern wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would system-wide caching work unless the HTTP server dropbox requested the file from sent a checksum of the file being requested? Just because something has the same URL doesn't mean that it's the same file at the other end ( http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz for instance)

It obey's HTTP caching controls. Checkout the end of the docs: https://www.dropbox.com/developers/dropins/saver

I see - but the typical dropbox deduplication methods wouldn't work here (at least not in terms of bandwidth usage), would they?

Re: Datastore API (beta)

#59

Post by mikelehen »

sankethkatta wrote: post #57
fireboi wrote: post #53

are there any kind souls that could help please explain the difference between dropbox datastore, firebase and parse? thank you.

In comparison to firebase, this solves the offline sync problem, if your user is offline, you can still save to dropbox datastore locally, when you get a connection, it will automatically sync and take care of conflict resolution.

Firebase dev here. :-) Firebase does handle offline syncing / conflict resolution.

If you have a Firebase app open and you lose network connectivity, the app still continues to work fine and any modifications you make will be synced back to Firebase when you regain connectivity.

What we don't (quite yet) do is handle the case where you make changes, kill the app (without regaining network connectivity), restart the app, and then get network connectivity, but that's coming soon.

As for other differences, Dropbox Datastore seems to be tightly tied to Dropbox, so the end user for your app must have a Dropbox account (and if they want to collaborate with other users, those users must also have Dropbox accounts, etc.). So it's really for building apps on top of Dropbox.

Firebase and Parse are just generic backends, with no ties to other services, so your end users don't need anything to use your app.

As for differentiating Parse and Firebase, Firebase deals with data in real-time, pushing updates to apps as soon as data changes. Parse is a traditional request/response model, where your app has to explicitly "refresh" to get new data.

Re: Datastore API (beta)

#60

Post by amirmc »

nly wrote: post #47
roc wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it turns out, the protocol for actually transferring the files is utterly irrelevant compared to the protocol for getting updates, keeping various local stores synchronized, retaining versions, managing conflicts, handling client-side bugs and surprises, etc.

It's a good point I suppose. I've never had a need or urge to use a service like Dropbox to keep files in sync though. I prefer just to carry my working copies around, or use Google Docs. Maybe I'm missing out on seamless splendour, I don't know.

> "Maybe I'm missing out on seamless splendour, I don't know."

I'd say that yes, you are (no snark intended). Dropbox is one of those things that you didn't really know you needed until you've used it for a while. It crept up on me and became indispensable for pretty much every collaborative project I've worked on.

Post reply on HN