The Dropbox API

yep. You'll want to change it so Plaintext doesn't operate out of a folder, but can see your whole Dropbox. See FAQ #11 here: http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/plaintext/faq

jaredsohn4• 15 years ago

Finally, Dropbox lets apps request access to only a single folder. Now you can try out an app without worrying that you're giving access to your private data.

Many people were asking about this feature on Hacker News just yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3136098

tvongaza• 15 years ago

Unfortunately there is no way to share app sandbox folders limiting their use in multiuser environments: https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/1916/share-app-sandbox-folde...

euroclydon3• 15 years ago

Seems like its all server code. It'd be nice to do x-domain posts straight from the browser to Dropbox.

avolcano2• 15 years ago

This would be incredible. Web apps that are 100% HTML5/Javascript/LocalStorage could then use Dropbox to store/retrieve data in the cloud.

euroclydon3• 15 years ago

I'm hoping someone will tell me why it's a security problem, but yeah, for a whole slew of apps, I'd like eliminate server logic or at least make it simple to swap out backends.

temphn• 15 years ago

How would that differ from S3? Is the concept that people would also have a better local UI on their data directory?

Timothee• 15 years ago

Though it's still a young project, you might be interested in Unhosted: http://unhosted.org/

It's an OSS project that kind of aims at doing that kind of stuff. (if I'm not mistaking your post)

jaredsohn4• 15 years ago

If it is not possible, I think it is more a web programming limitation rather than Dropbox failing to implement something.

Everything their SDKs do can also be done using their REST API (https://www.dropbox.com/developers/reference/api) and they support JSONP to allow cross-domain GET queries. However, my understanding is that JSONP is not supported for other REST methods, most importantly POSTs. A person claims to have found a workaround for doing POSTs via JSONP here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5345493/using-put-post-de....

Has anyone tried that or know of a way to do cross-domain POSTs?

IgorPartola• 15 years ago

You can do cross-domain POSTs. You just cannot get a response from the server. Often times though you can get the length of the response. This can be used to do a POST to change settings on an unsecured Wi-Fi routers, for example and checking whether the call succeeded or not by the length of the response.

The method described in the SO answer is similar, from what I can tell, to what DISQUS uses. I believe they call it JSONPI: http://alexsexton.com/thirdparty/#forms-are-cool-too

sdizdar• 15 years ago

This is excellent: I especially like revision control and "undelete" (still not as powerful as Google Docs but enough for majority of apps).

Allowing access to only a single folder is an excellent feature (Google Docs does not have that): basically you can make Dropbox as a dropbox or sendbox.

And shameless plug: if you need to real-time replication of multiple Basecamp/Google Doc accounts with Dropbox try this: https://cloudHQ.net/ (and you probably understand why we are excited to finally get "single folder access feature").

davidvanleeuwen• 15 years ago

Aw man, awesome stuff. Searching, revisions... those things are really helpful.

I'm still hoping that POST notifications / webhooks will be introduced soon. That will definitely make the web a better place.

bryanh4• 15 years ago

I've been working with the Dropbox API (among MANY others...) for my early stage startup Snapier (http://snapier.com/), and I must say it is a pleasure to work with. Very sensible and logical. I can't say that about all API's...

Another example of how Dropbox is gonna keep its momentum. With it, it should be rather straightforward to bake in some cool iCloud type of preview/revision stuff into native apps.

vijaydev• 15 years ago

In Snapier, it will be better if you have a message why you are asking for emails. More importantly, provide a message which is a little more than "Thank you very much" when I enter my email. Though I got an email within a second, it will be more user friendly to give a "We'll connect back soon" in the site itself.

Also, in the email you mention 'check us out on Twitter' but fail to provide the twitter id.

Just my two cents. If any of that sounds badly phrased, I blame the clock for showing 3 AM. Cheers :)

bryanh4• 15 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. It was very slapdash but we hope to replace it with something more... robust soon.

thedjpetersen• 15 years ago

Kudos to the Dropbox team for developing their product into a platform. Giving developers an opportunity to develop things on top of their product keeps not only the community excited about things to do with Dropbox, it also gives them fresh ideas from how people consider to use it.

tomjen3• 15 years ago

This is interesting although I really really wished they had used oauth v2 since it is so much better and is designed to give a first class experience on mobile devices.

In fact I can't think of any good reason to use the older version but I would like to hear if there are anybody who has different experiences since I haven't worked much with it.

gabrielh• 15 years ago

OAuth 2 is way simpler but requires HTTPS, which may have overhead at scale.

count• 15 years ago

Everything has overhead at scale. I think the 'HTTPS is hard on computers' stage has passed by though...its just not that computationally intensive on modern hardware.

ivankirigin4• 15 years ago

If you use the SDKs on mobile devices, users can auth via their Dropbox native app if they have it installed. https://www.dropbox.com/developers/reference/sdk

kisielk3• 15 years ago

Maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't the way the app authentication works preclude it from being used for client-side apps?

For example in https://www.dropbox.com/developers/start/authentication#pyth... you set both APP_KEY and APP_SECRET. Of course anyone can read the source and get these, so what keeps them from impersonating your app by using the same key and secret?

For iOS and Android this is probably less of an issue, but someone could probably glean the values by searching your binary.

johns• 15 years ago

Before the redesign they had a page that explained the API is not for desktop client use, only mobile and web apps. I can't find the new equivalent, but maybe I'm missing something.

For mobile you can embed the key and secret, because they only work in combination with someone authenticating their account to use your app https://www.dropbox.com/developers/start/authentication#ios

kisielk3• 15 years ago

I understand that, but what keeps someone from pulling your key and secret out of your app and creating a trojan app? For example the app could look like your app, use the same key and secret, still authenticate as the user, but then steal their data and upload it to a third party server.

That may not be easily doable with iOS since Apple does a good job of curating their market, but I can imagine someone making a fake app like this that runs on Android and getting in to the Android market.

bentoner• 15 years ago

Is there a way to discover which user uploaded a particular revision of a file (to a shared folder)?

audionerd• 15 years ago

If you can now run automated searches across multiple Dropbox accounts, think what that does for aggregating file storage and sharing.

Imagine how easy it would be to build a multi-user pseudo-P2P file search/share app on top of Dropbox now.

Or imagine when a user can sync/export their settings from a "cloud" service to a SQLite file in their Dropbox automatically.

cemregr• 15 years ago

Revisions! Somebody should hack together a "Dropbox Time Machine" this weekend!

The Dropbox API

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