Drop Box Support

[tonyt]

Hi Brendan
I was going to switch but saw in a thread they were not updating their support any more. Is it worth switching, or does that mean you will have to drop Drop Box?
If it is worth it, is there a guide to switch sync services and how to do it?
Cheers
tonyt

[Brendan]

Hi Tony,

It still works (for now) and Dropbox said that it would still work even after they dropped support for the Dropbox Sync API, but there’s no future in it. That’s why I’m working hard on migrating Tap Forms to the Couchbase database system. With that you’ll be able to do peer-to-peer syncing between devices without the need for any cloud service if you so choose.

Thanks,

Brendan

[DrJJWMac]

I just want to “think out loud” here for a moment.

I see that DropBox is depreciating one type of API in place of another, so it is not as though “there’s no future in it”. As far as I can tell, developers just need to update their code.

I understand the advantages of peer-to-peer syncing that DropBox will not (ever) have compared to Couchbase. Yet I also appreciate the advantages of cloud storage that Couchbase may not have compared to DropBox (unless you sign up for it). Finally, I am perhaps old school in my reluctance to have to register for YACS (yet another cloud storage) to get the cloud storage that I already have with DropBox (and GoogleDocs and Evernote and …).

So, I guess I am talking to myself perhaps wondering whether I will have to sign up for YACS to have the security of cloud storage again once TapForms switches to Couchbase? What might that mean to me (aside from keeping yet another password entry in my head)? Will I still be able to secure a cloud storage in DropBox and use a non-registered, direct-sync version of Couchbase (so that I do not have to register on the Couchbase site)?

And who will say that tomorrow Couchbase may not change their API?

—
JJW

[Brendan]

Couchbase is an open-source database engine that speaks the same sync protocol as other systems, such as IBM’s Cloudant service. I’m actually investigating Cloudant as a possible host for the cloud sync service. The nice thing about Couchbase is that their Sync Gateway and Couchbase Server are also open source, so you could fairly easily setup your own “cloud” server and sync to that for nothing. A service such as Cloudant does cost money though. I’m investigating all possibilities in that area.

Dropbox has deprecated their Sync API, not the Core API. The Sync API is what Tap Forms uses right now for syncing files with Dropbox. However, the Sync API is written on top of the Core API, so it will continue to work once they’ve fully stopped supporting it. However, that doesn’t mean it’ll continue to work on newer versions of iOS. I already have a problem with it in that it hasn’t been supported with bitcode support. That’s a new feature in iOS 9 that will reduce the size of app downloads because the device will only download and install the code that’s suitable for the processor the app is running on. Right now all apps are distributed as “Fat Binaries” which contain both 32 bit and 64 bit code and possibly code for other Apple ARM processor variations. I’ve asked Dropbox if they can recompile the Dropbox Sync API to use bitcode support, but they haven’t done that yet and simply said “we’ll investigate”. But I’d be surprised if they added support for bitcode.

I know people don’t like change and they don’t want to have to sign up for yet another cloud service and they certainly don’t want to have to pay for it, but unfortunately sync is a super hard problem to solve and it’s not as easy as just having your database file sitting in your cloud storage and having it just magically sync. If it were that easy I would have done it that way long ago. But people far smarter than I have come up with a pretty decent sync algorithm and put it into Couchbase, so I’m giving that a shot now to see how it goes.

I haven’t even gotten Tap Forms up and running yet with Couchbase. I’m close, but there’s still about a weeks worth of work for me to do just to get it to run. Then I get to see if it even works at all given all the changes I’ve made to the code. If it doesn’t work as well as I hope, then I throw it all away and start again back from where I started with a source code snapshot from the last production release.

Another benefit of Couchbase is it allows for a very flexible database schema which will make it easier for me to support new features going forward.

Thanks,

Brendan

[DrJJWMac]

Thank you Brendan for the further details. It is always nice when a developer fills in the “what if’s” of a proposed plan. You’ve done a great job in your post (as you always do).

I have heard elsewhere that syncing with Dropbox is rather flaky (something about it scrambling binary-encoded files). I can appreciate your desire to have the most stable, best-designed platform as you move forward. I look forward to what you discover and develop next.

Thanks!

—
JJW

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