State of unhosted/remoteStorage integration in ownCloud

[Jan-Christoph Borchardt]

Hey!

Where are we with remoteStorage integration in ownCloud? A previous version was usable as remoteStorage (pretty awesome and well received by people) but then things changed around and now there’s not really anything. There’s a pull request for »Open Web Apps« at https://github.com/owncloud/apps/pull/448 – unclear what it is, whether it works or if that even includes remoteStorage.

Unfortunately it’s also too late for inclusion in the upcoming ownCloud 5 release. It’s a bummer because ownCloud is a high-profile personal data server and they would ship remoteStorage support if it worked. Gladly the release cycles are pretty short so it could be included in version 6.

Michiel, would be really cool if you could update on that and maybe also invest some time in making that work. I think it’s totally worth it. What do you think?

[Michiel B. de Jong]

On 2013-03-12 01:35, Jan-Christoph Borchardt wrote:
> Where are we with remoteStorage integration in ownCloud?

The current situation is you have to install it from
https://github.com/michielbdejong/owncloud-owa and OC5 is not supported
yet, so you have to run OC4.

Also you need to run over https, and add a second origin on your server
(e.g. open an extra port on which Apache is listening), which will
probably be too much work for most casual users.

And users might expect that "integration" means that your ownCloud
calendar, addressbook and picture gallery will integrate with
remoteStorage.calendar, remoteStorage.contacts and
remoteStorage.pictures, which would is not the case either. Achieving
that would require a lot of refactoring of those existing ownCloud apps,
probably, or special custom routing for those scopes to map on the
existing data from those existing ownCloud apps.

There is also interest in the ownCloud-OpenPhoto integration, which
could work via remoteStorage, but that would additionally require quite
a bit of work on OpenPhoto.

Having said that, it's working and I'm using an ownCloud instance
running on localhost every day as my main remoteStorage account. I
personally don't use any OC-native apps though, so I have no need for an
OC5 instance, and keeping my instance on OC4 is not a problem.

I will at some point make time to port remoteStorage support to OC6
(I'll probably skip OC5), but for now I think the other hurdles are
significant enough that anyone who is willing to take them might as well
run OC4 as well. Since the data doesn't integrate with "OC-native" apps
anyway, you could also run an OC4 instance for your remoteStorage and an
OC5 instance for your OC-native apps.

About the change from "remoteStorage" to "Open web apps", this is
because it now supports storage-first, so to the user it's like an apps
launch panel. The name of that panel inside OC is "Open web apps", which
is why i named the app like that as well.

[Jan-Christoph Borchardt]

We are about to write a Notes app for ownCloud. Since it's very similar to Litewrite, I want to know what's needed to enable Litewrite to use the same data via remoteStorage.

What we do currently with the Notes app is just use a »Notes« folder in the Files app and save the notes in there as plain txt. This should ideally stay that way because it enables desktop syncing via the client.

Now I'm not sure if it makes sense at all to try to do that, also because Litewrite doesn't just use text. Locally we also use JSON for te Notes app, maybe that can be exposed/saved/synced.

The code is at http://github.com/owncloud/notes, Bernhard (@Raydiation) and I are about to port it to AngularJS in the js-fixes branch.

Any advice welcome, I'd really like to get this syncing.

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[Jan-Christoph Borchardt]

Moved discussion to the issue tracker at https://github.com/owncloud/notes/issues/9

Please participate there if you have any ideas.