I am working on a web application that will be used to securely share files between individuals. In terms of functionality what I deem important is easy file sharing, good ux, and secure storage. I want to integrate this functionality into my web application. I am working in the Ruby on Rails framework and have played around with carrierwave and Amazon S3 integration but I can't help but wonder if there is not a complete solution out there already.
My question thus is: Are there file sharing open source solutions or paid products out there which I can plug in to my web application that I should be investigating and not build the whole file sharing component from the start? I do not mind paying a fee for this software.
You could try https://github.com/mischa78/boxroom
Boxroom is a Rails application that aims to be a simple interface for
managing and sharing files in a web browser. It lets users create
folders and upload, download and share files. Admins can manage users,
groups and permissions.
Caplinked is a virtual data room provider that provides an API which will securely store and share your files / documents between individuals and groups. They also have a Ruby on Rails SDK which seems pretty easy to use. Check out their developer portal.
Related
We've been using the Dropbox Sync API in our iOS app for the last couple of years. This API allows us to treat the user's Dropbox folder like a second file system, making it simple to access the contents. It also downloads and uploads new versions of files automatically, so we have to do very little work other than hooking it into our application. In short, it's a nice API that abstracted away all the "difficult bits" (file caching, etc) that was a pleasure for us to use.
Unfortunately, Dropbox are turning off the Sync API at the end of June, so we need to find an alternative. Moving to the new Dropbox "v2 API" would require us to reimplement the "difficult bits" of the old Sync API to provide the same functionality to users, so we're looking for alternatives in case there's a simpler solution.
Are there APIs to allow an app to access the user's Google Drive or OneDrive files, that are as simple to use as the old Dropbox Sync API? Ideally I want the API to handle all the caching automatically, so that we only have to say "open file X" or "overwrite file Y", and have it handle all the difficult bits (do I check the server for a new version of the file? What if I'm offline? Do I have a cached version saved here already? etc).
Or is that an outdated model, and we should just plan to use Apple's UIDocumentPicker API instead, to allow access to whatever cloud services the user has installed on their device?
I am developing an iOS application (to be deployed on the App Store) that requires content updates on a weekly basis.
I understand that the best way to achieve this would be to use a server, where the app would query for new data and download responses in JSON. However I am not knowledgeable when it comes to HTML, PHP or MySQL and therefore am endeavoring to find an alternative.
Here's an idea: using Dropbox to substitute for a server backend. My app connects to one central Dropbox account, checks for new files, and downloads them if present.
Is this idea feasible? If not, are there any alternatives?
Dropbox cannot be a dependable substitute for your server/backend for following reasons:
Dropbox uses OAuth for authentication, which needs user interaction. You do not want your app users to go through Dropbox authentication with your 'common' credentials.
Users who have a Dropbox account or the app installed, will most likely use their own credentials to login which completely breaks your flow.
Drobox, although a good way of sharing and syncing files is not meant for more meaningful data like web services etc or user/database interaction etc. Just syncing JSON file may suffice your app's needs for now but from a long term perspective you want a proper back end.
As suggested in the comment by #tkanzakic you can use one of the substitution services if you don't want to get too technical on the backend.
I am pretty late to the party, but this is possible and not necessarily a stupid idea (though this depends on what you need). You might want to have a look at remote storage for example, which allows you to use Dropbox among other providers as backend.
For sure, you can use the Dropbox Sync API to achieve this (https://www.dropbox.com/developers/sync).
just recently I was thinking and wondered, how does Dropbox upload my files to its S3 storage and how might that one be organized?
Let's just completely forget about the sync aspect for a second and scale the problem down to one S3 bucket.
Say, in that bucket's root directory you have lots of folders, each belonging to an arbitrary user.
Now if that user wants to upload a file to his folder... how does that happen internally? I mean, Dropbox can't just store the Amazon S3 access credentials/keys hard-coded into the application (be it on ios or windows) as it might get reverse-engineered and thus exposed.
Any thoughts on this?
Thanks!
Some guys from EADS did reengineering on Dropbox, the presentation slides are available for download: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF
DROPBOX SOFTWARE SECURITY
In the same way websites don't allow users to directly access their databases but rather provide interfaces that can control permissions and handle authentication, I'm sure Dropbox has some kind of application that the client on your computer interacts with. Their server daemon will have permissions to write to the disk, but your computer has to go through it (and it's security procedures) before anything your computer sends is written.
I have a Rails application that I want to add file upload to, so that the users have access to a "resources" section where they can upload and share (although not publicly) any type of file. I know I could build a solution using paperclip and S3 for example, but to try and avoid the admin overhead of all that I'm looking at API interfaces to drop.io and box.net. Does anyone have any experience of these? I've got a basic demo working rather well to drop.io, but I was just wondering if anyone had any better ideas or experiences.
Many thanks
D
I use attachment_fu with S3 backend. For User Interface goodness, I use YUI's file uploader.
Some of the files are uploaded with world read access, others with no public read access.
I use Attachement_fu to create self-signed urls to enable clients to access the private S3 files.
I did write some small helper routines for the S3 library for re-connecting after a timeout, handling various errors that the S3 library can raise, etc.
Building your own library for drop.io and/or box.net
Your idea of using the API for a commercial service is interesting but I haven't run into any problems with the above config. And the price for direct S3 access is very low.
If you do decide to go this route, you may want to open source your code. You'd benefit by getting testing, ideas, and possible code contributions from the community.
Note that if you have a lot of uploads, you can end up with a performance issue if the uploads are synchronous with the Rails thread--the rails process is busy uploading and can't do anything else until the upload is done.
HTH,
Larry
I want to put the Twitter service on my server and customize it for my purpose. I have no idea how it works.
My goal is to communicate to your own Twitter server rather than the original twitter server and serve my purpose.
You should check out: StatusNet. It is an open source micro blogging platform. From their site, you can download the source and deploy it on your own server. Once you have it installed you can customize it to your liking.
Twitter isn't an Open Source project - they don't provide their server code.
From my experience at another company deploying very widely distributed systems, the chances are there's a bucket-load of infrastructure you'd need to get running first - complete overkill for a single-server solution, but vital for a global service with many millions of users. In other words, even if Twitter did provide their code, it probably wouldn't be an appropriate solution for your situation.
The actual Twitter (twitter.com) service is proprietary, you can't run it yourself.
There are plenty of open source twitter clones out there. The more general name is "microblogging". Pinax for example has basic microblogging. Try searching google for 'open source microblogging' for other projects.
I don't believe the Twitter platform is freely available to the general public. If you want to make your own "Twitter server", you're going to have to clone the service yourself.
You can't run Twitter on your own server, but you can write your own application that talks to Twitter through Twitter's API.
It all depends on what you mean by "customizing" Twitter. There are many applications like Twitpic and TweetDeck that are built "on top of" Twitter. They add their own functionality while leaving Twitter to do the "heavy lifting".
For example, I have written a personal project for moderating a stream of tweets. This application runs on my local server, but it gets its data by querying Twitter's API.
There are two main advantages to extending rather than rebuilding Twitter:
It takes a lot less effort because you can reuse all the basic functions of Twitter
You can take advantage of Twitter's huge user base. Even if you succeeded in cloning Twitter, it would be far less interesting than the original because Twitter works by strength of numbers.
You could use Wordpress and get the twitter developer add in then get a api code from them and there users can use your site and vice versa also apps for twitter will work for your site.
Wow. That's a highly ambitious request that you have there. Twitter isn't like Wordpress, there's no .org version that can be downloaded and run locally. Twitter is a highly scalable service that is designed to run on large scale servers.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news to you on this.