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Datastore API (beta)

dropbox.com

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Re: Datastore API (beta)

#61

Post by lovemenot »

peterkelly wrote: post #30
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.

Well, the nice thing about PRISM is that it's API is so simple that you don't even need to muck around with SDKs, REST, JSON encoding etc. Integration is completely straightforward.

Expect to see the NSA as a back-up-of-last-resort cloud solution provider any time soon?

Re: Datastore API (beta)

#62

Post by fireboi »

mikelehen wrote: post #59
sankethkatta wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

good stuff.. thanks mike!

Re: Datastore API (beta)

#64

Post by mmahemoff »

timdorr wrote: post #11
mmahemoff wrote: post #8

Something I don't get about Dropbox API: Why can't I just throw URLs at it? If a user wants to save , I have to pull it to my server and push it into Dropbox. Dropbox could just have grabbed it directly and in many cases, won't even have to thanks, to system-wide caching. (This is based on the last time I looked at the API; maybe this is supported now, but I don't think so.)

You're describing the Saver Drop-In: https://www.dropbox.com/developers/dropins/saver

Great to know they got around to this and did so in a way that leverages the existing HTTP caching protocols. Thanks!

Re: Datastore API (beta)

#65

Post by sankethkatta »

mikelehen wrote: post #59
sankethkatta wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Thanks mike, I didn't realize firebase did offline syncing now!

Re: Datastore API (beta)

#66

Post by vidarh »

peterkelly wrote: post #43
nly wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By Jove, you're right! Perhaps what we need is some kind of universal protocol for transferring files. We could call it the 'File Transfer Protocol' or something.

LOL yes ;) What happened to FTP anyway? I know there were a number of issues with it (security, working through NAT, lack of a standard directory listing format etc); but these were all problems that people managed to solve in different ways. It just goes to show how far how our industry is willing to embrace change for the sake of change (with the results sometimes being inferior) every time a new buzzord appears. I…

People didn't "solve" those problems so much as hack their way around them in a wide variety of ways with no standardization, that is the problem. Having to occasionally support customers that need FTP servers, I can tell you that it is a never-ending nightmare of incompatible clients, server settings that must be set differently depending on customer requirements just because of issues with FTP, and firewall problems (on the customers side, though it also creates hassles on our end).

Pretty much anything would be better than FTP.

Re: Datastore API (beta)

#67

Post by est »

jimbokun wrote: post #56

"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.

There's also limit on Postgres hstore and arrays. No nested sturcture.

Re: Datastore API (beta)

#68

Post by brettcvz »

peterkelly wrote: post #25

The biggest problem right now with online file storage services (sorry, I meant "The Cloud") is that while they all do basically the same stuff, there's no standard protocol for accessing them. It's a bit like if every website used a custom protocol instead of HTTP, and web browser vendors had to explicitly collaborate with each web site (or use the website's SDK) in order to be able to retrieve content. Imagine this…

Check out https://www.inkfilepicker.com/

Re: Datastore API (beta)

#69

Post by shiiba »

mikelehen wrote: post #59
sankethkatta wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

So good!

Re: Datastore API (beta)

#70

Post by icefox »

jonaldomo wrote: post #21

After quickly clicking through the api documentation I don't understand why I would use this over a hosted NoSql database like mongohq. I still like having additional options though.

Perhaps you don't want to host a db just for user data.
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