<story><title>Datastore API (beta)</title><url>https://www.dropbox.com/developers/datastore</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>peterkelly</author><text>The biggest problem right now with online file storage services (sorry, I meant &amp;quot;The Cloud&amp;quot;) is that while they all do basically the same stuff, there&amp;#x27;s no standard protocol for accessing them. It&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s SDK) in order to be able to retrieve content.&lt;p&gt;Imagine this: All the major players in the space (Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Skydrive, Sugarsync etc.) as well as app developers got together and came up with a standard way of doing this that makes it possible to use a single protocol &amp;amp; API for all online storage providers. I see this being a good thing for everyone - users can choose whatever service they want, app developers can easily provide their customers with a ton of options, and storage providers don&amp;#x27;t have to explicitly produce their own SDK or court developers to do integration with their service. We did have WebDAV, but that doesn&amp;#x27;t seem to be widely adopted by any of the major players.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been facing this problem myself with my own app; it&amp;#x27;s a lot of work to support all the major services and this is really just plumbing stuff that everyone would rather be taken care of so they can focus on the more important stuff. I had a meeting with Box recently where I proposed the idea of an open source framework for iOS which would provide a common native API that abstracts over all the different REST APIs used by different storage providers. The people I spoke to seemed quite open to the idea and agreed that it would be useful. I don&amp;#x27;t think a library like this would necessary be considered a bad thing by any of the major players, as it evens out the playing field and makes it easy to support different services.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re interested in taking part and&amp;#x2F;or using such an API in your iOS app, I&amp;#x27;d love to hear your thoughts on the matter. I have some code already (which I haven&amp;#x27;t released yet) and am looking to clean up the API a bit, but I think it would be useful to a lot of developers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davidjgraph</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s exactly the idea of Remote Storage [0]. The problem is here that the lowest common denominator of functionality isn&amp;#x27;t actually very much.&lt;p&gt;Anything but fairly trivial apps quickly run into problems with application data (how relevant), file patching, file intents (Google have this),&lt;p&gt;Google have, IMO, the most advanced solution in the space, so you could argue have the most the lose from standardising. But in fairness, some of their stuff (I&amp;#x27;m thinking the real-time collaboration part of the Drive API) is so complex, there&amp;#x27;s no way you&amp;#x27;d ever see it in a common standard.&lt;p&gt;That said, it&amp;#x27;d be really nice to see a common API over the lower stuff.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;http://remotestorage.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;remotestorage.io&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Datastore API (beta)</title><url>https://www.dropbox.com/developers/datastore</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>peterkelly</author><text>The biggest problem right now with online file storage services (sorry, I meant &amp;quot;The Cloud&amp;quot;) is that while they all do basically the same stuff, there&amp;#x27;s no standard protocol for accessing them. It&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s SDK) in order to be able to retrieve content.&lt;p&gt;Imagine this: All the major players in the space (Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Skydrive, Sugarsync etc.) as well as app developers got together and came up with a standard way of doing this that makes it possible to use a single protocol &amp;amp; API for all online storage providers. I see this being a good thing for everyone - users can choose whatever service they want, app developers can easily provide their customers with a ton of options, and storage providers don&amp;#x27;t have to explicitly produce their own SDK or court developers to do integration with their service. We did have WebDAV, but that doesn&amp;#x27;t seem to be widely adopted by any of the major players.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been facing this problem myself with my own app; it&amp;#x27;s a lot of work to support all the major services and this is really just plumbing stuff that everyone would rather be taken care of so they can focus on the more important stuff. I had a meeting with Box recently where I proposed the idea of an open source framework for iOS which would provide a common native API that abstracts over all the different REST APIs used by different storage providers. The people I spoke to seemed quite open to the idea and agreed that it would be useful. I don&amp;#x27;t think a library like this would necessary be considered a bad thing by any of the major players, as it evens out the playing field and makes it easy to support different services.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re interested in taking part and&amp;#x2F;or using such an API in your iOS app, I&amp;#x27;d love to hear your thoughts on the matter. I have some code already (which I haven&amp;#x27;t released yet) and am looking to clean up the API a bit, but I think it would be useful to a lot of developers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>icebraining</author><text>Big players aren&amp;#x27;t interested in anything that reduces lock-in. Seamless integration is one of the keypoints they have to get you to use their services.&lt;p&gt;Obligatory presentation by Bruce Schneier on the online feudalism: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.infoq.com/presentations/cloud-security&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.infoq.com&amp;#x2F;presentations&amp;#x2F;cloud-security&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>