Data Storage Providers

[jstephenr]

Long-time lurker, first time poster.

Are there any data storage providers setup to provide data to unhosted apps? If so, who are they? How do you get signed up? But isn't the ultimate solution to have the user's data stored and provided on/from their own PC? If so, how does one set that up? It needs to be brain-dead simple for this thing to really take off.

Please let me know if I'm misunderstanding something. I really want this project to succeed and am thinking about ways to use this idea in some apps, but the data storage bit has me hung up.

Stephen

[Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson]

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 6:09 PM, jstephenr <jste...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Long-time lurker, first time poster.
>
> Are there any data storage providers setup to provide data to unhosted apps?
> If so, who are they? How do you get signed up? But isn't the ultimate
> solution to have the user's data stored and provided on/from their own PC?
> If so, how does one set that up? It needs to be brain-dead simple for this
> thing to really take off.

Many people prefer cloud storage because of better uptimes than local
storage. However, if you do want to do local storage, you should be
able to combine something like CouchDB or whatever the reference
storage implementation is, with PageKite (http://pagekite.org/) or a
similar service.

I've been waiting for the storage specs to settle down (and for a gap
in my schedule, which may be the blocker now) before adding native
support to PageKite - but you can combine it with other things for
sure.

--
Bjarni R. Einarsson
Founder, lead developer of PageKite.

Make localhost servers visible to the world: http://pagekite.net/

[Michiel de Jong]

hi! yeah, you're absolutely right. we need a freemium provider to step up.

To set up your own server, do the following:
- install today's master of owncloud in the root of your domain (not in a subdir)
- make sure you have 'AllowOverride All' in the apache config, enable mod_rewrite, and restart apache
- comment out the 'die()' statement at the top of /var/www/apps/user_webfinger/activate.php, to indicate that you understand that you're experimenting with code that is only a few hours old. :)
- browse to http://yourdomain.com/apps/user_webfinger/activate.php
- double-check that http://yourdomain.com/.well-known/host-meta shows an xml file.
- now your owncloud user should be usable like this: http://vimeo.com/28932610 (we'll make this all a bit nicer before we publish it officially).

As Bjarni said, you can use pagekite to run this on a device that you physically control, like a plug server.

Next month, our protocol will be compatible with not only WebDAV, but also CouchDb. Then, you will hopefully be able to use iriscouch as a freemium provider (we will talk to them to see if we can get a few patches in).

for the general public who are not ready yet to set up new accounts, but do want to start using your app, we will provide an adoption ramp. obvious targets for this are GoogleDocs any-file storage and DropBox. these people can then already start using your app, simply with their google user address (we will provide a proxy to work around the fact that google offers only single-origin webfinger), and obtain the freedom to maybe switch to a free option at a later time.

also, if your apps are interesting for students and/or researchers, then they are likely to become usable with staff&student user addresses from several universities - at first in the Netherlands, and if that pilot works out, then other universities from other countries will follow.

You could also consider setting up a 'default' hosted storage node for people who want to use your app but don't (yet) have any remote storage linked to their user address.

But yeah, right now there's not so much to see on that front yet, but in one or two months, that picture will be entirely different, and your apps will have pre-installed user bases. is that timescale workable for you?


Cheers!
Michiel

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 6:09 PM, jstephenr <jste...@gmail.com> wrote:

[jstephenr]

Wonderful answers, both. Thank you. I will do as you've suggested and start getting familiar with the various solutions. Just throw in another wrinkle, I'm very interested in hosting user data on the user's mobile phone, as I believe the mobile phone is THE platform to target now and into the future. I'm pretty sure I've seen Android apps that turn your phone into a web server. I want to check those out in conjunction with local storage to take unhosted mobile. Exciting stuff!

Stephen

[Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson]

Mobile phones are very exciting indeed!

Unfortunately they are also often behind NAT, so you will need
something like PageKite - but PageKite for mobile is still in it's
infancy, and barely that. You can run the Python code in SL4A on
Android, but that's not really a scalable solution. Nokia did some
experiments in this vein as well, for the Symbian platform, but that
was years ago and I think their code was never fully open sourced.

[Flyingmana]

On Monday, September 12, 2011 6:54:57 PM UTC+2, Michiel de Jong wrote:

hi! yeah, you're absolutely right. we need a freemium provider to step up.

 I think i will setup one, but i would like to have some kind of testkit to test the storage, as i need to write an own backend to effectively do freemium with it.

There should be a testscript anyway, so you dont need anymore to test each function of storage manually, if something does not work.

[Michiel de Jong]

Great, Flyingmana! We'll chat about it on IRC when you're there, or we can meet in person in Berlin so I can help you set things up.

Yeah, you're right, I'll write a test script for quick diagnosis. You'll have it by the end of the week.

[Charles-H. Schulz]

hello Michiel,

forgive this silly question, but sometimes down the road (in a few months) I think there will be a rather big cloud infrastructure that might be interested in implementing Unhosted storage.

Is there any page that highlights in simple steps the technical requirements for an unhosted cloud storage provider?

Thanks,

Charles. 

2011/9/13 Michiel de Jong <mic...@unhosted.org>

[Michiel de Jong]

Hi Charles,

no, not a silly question at all. They should implement a key-value store with a REST interface. Specifically, the interface should be webdav with cors, accessible through oauth, and discoverable via webfinger.

Details of what exactly to implement are here: http://unhosted.org/spec/dav/0.1

Next month we will (probably) remove the requirement on the advanced webdav verbs (PROPFIND, PROPPATCH, etcetera), and reduce the requirements to just GET, PUT and DELETE. That will make it easier to implement.

The main technical challenge will be to set up a big key-value store. If they have that, then the rest is a matter of tweaking the interface on top of it. I'll be glad to help through http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=unhosted or via email or i could come over if necessary.

Cheers!
Michiel.