Dropbox API - using Dropbox as a server

Question

I wanted to use a file sharing server to update and update certain files in multiple instances of my application on several computers, for example (for example), write a multi-player game that stores all the positions of the players in a text file and uses something like Dropbox, in order to maintain a constant text file in all applications, and each instance of the application can modify the file with this position of the player, and then other applications can be updated accordingly. This is just an example, and I do not intend to do this with this technology. What I want to do is not very quickly connected with fast data sharing, but only with periodic downloading and updating of a text file.

I was wondering how I can do this using the Dropbox API for Objective-C, without asking the user for a single Dropbox username / password - just save one Dropbox account, log in automatically and update / upload the file stored on it ?

From what I learned from the experiment, Dropbox offers users to use their passwords through a web browser and is designed to host multiple accounts, while I only need to consider the Server account.

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

Thanks for any help

Ben

Answer 1

You might consider using the Google App Engine (GAE). I recently had a similar requirement, and I think this is a good option when you need centralized data. Alternatively, can you use a non-browser account using native authentication, or do I think this is possible even through OAuth? Depending on how sensitive the data is, I think. I just had a ride.

From my research, I found that using Dropbox as a server has some scalability issues, since you are limited to maybe 5,000 calls per day. source It was built on Amazon S3, so you can also use it directly.

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

I found an open source project for doing this using Java , an alternative you can see Python example

Answer 2

I wrote a daemon that constantly checks for updated files and synchronizes them. I wrote it for my iOS application for file manager. You can find the implementation here:

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

Answer 3

I personally am not an iOS developer, but I came across this question looking for something else and thought I was proposing another potential solution to the OP issue.

Microsoft has just released something called Azure Mobile Services, which supports iOS development (among other platforms). This is basically a convenient way to configure the rear system complete with push notifications, authentication, etc., without minimizing your own. You do not need to know anything about Azure or servers, as the configuration process goes through most of them. This is new, so keep that in mind, but it looks promising for such situations.

Here is a 10-minute video that explains how to use it with an iOS-developed application, as well as links to additional documentation: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/iOS-Support-in-Windows-Azure-Mobile-Services /

Hope this helps.