Dropbox API - Using Dropbox as a server

Question

I was wanting to use a file sharing server to keep certain files up-to-date and constant across multiple instances of my application across multiple computers - like (for example) writing a multiplayer game, which stores all the player's positions in a text file, and uses something like Dropbox to keep the text file constant across all the applications, and each application instance can change the file with that application's player's position, and then the rest of the applications can update accordingly. This is only an example, and is not what I intend to do using this technology. What I want to do does not rely on fast sharing of data very quickly - but only periodically downloading and updating the text file.

I was wondering how I might be able to do this using the Dropbox API for Objective-C without prompting the user for any Dropbox username/password - just store a single Dropbox account's login information, log into it automatically and update/download the file stored on it?

From what I have found out from experimenting, Dropbox prompts users for their passwords via a web-broswer, and is designed to accommodate multiple accounts, whereas I only need to accommodate the 'Server' account.

So, is there anyway to do this sort of thing using the Dropbox API, or should I use something else. Or do I need to find out how to write my own server. Using some sort of file sharing API seems a lot easier to me than writing an actual server.

Thanks for any help,

Ben

Answer 1

You might think about using Google App Engine (GAE). I had a similar requirement recently and I'm thinking this is a good option when you want centralized data. Plus you can do the no-browser account login by using your own custom authentication, or I think it's even possible via OAuth? Depends on how sensitive the data is I guess. I just rolled my own.

From my research I found that using Dropbox as a server has some issues with scalability, since you'll be limited to maybe 5,000 calls per day. source It's built on Amazon S3, so you could also look at using that directly.

GAE lifts that limit up to 675,000, but can be increased up to 91 million for free. https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas

I did find an open-source project for doing this with Java , alternative you could look at Python example

Answer 2

I've written a daemon that continuously checks for updated files and syncs them. I wrote it for my own file manager iOS app. You can find the implementation here:

https://github.com/H2CO3/MyFile/tree/master/DropboxDaemon

Answer 3

I'm personally not an iOS developer but I came across this question while looking for something else and thought I would offer up another potential solution to the OP's question.

Microsoft just released something called Azure Mobile Services which supports iOS development (among other platforms). It's basically a convenient way to set up a back end system complete with push notifications, authentication, etc. without rolling your own. You don't need to know anything about Azure or servers as the setup process walks you through most of it. It is new so keep that in mind, but it looks promising for situations like this.

Here's a 10 minute video explaining how to use it with an iOS developed app along with links to more documentation: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/iOS-Support-in-Windows-Azure-Mobile-Services/

Hope this helps.