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This is my hope as well. One exciting technology I hope more app developers take advantage of is remoteStorage. https://remotestorage.io/ https://remotestorag
by lewisl9029 11y ago
This is my hope as well.
One exciting technology I hope more app developers take advantage of is remoteStorage.
https://remotestorage.io/ https://remotestorage.io/
It's basically an open spec for something similar to the Dropbox Datastore and Files APIs, with open-source implementations that anyone can host. The official client library has some fairly robust offline-first sync'ing capabilities, and also happens to be relatively backend agnostic, being able to act as an interface for either the remoteStorage API itself, or the actual Dropbox Datastore and Files APIs, as well as the Google Drive equivalents (although the latter two are under heavy development and probably not production-ready). This allows your users to choose the storage service they want to use for your app without you having to implement all 3 interfaces (and if they choose remoteStorage, be able to host their own storage instance or use one hosted by someone they trust).
I'm prototyping a distributed app right now that uses remoteStorage to enable multi-client sync and simultaneous logins. I believe this approach strikes a fairly good balance, giving users the privacy and service mobility offered by distributed software, as well as the usability and convenience offered by centralized software.
The only thing I feel they're sorely missing is a transparent encryption layer on top of the Datastore API (and possibly for Files too, though I'm not sure how feasible this is). I ended up implementing this part myself for the app I'm working on, but I feel it's unreasonable to expect every developer to reimplement something as essential and error-prone as cryptography.