Comment by peteforde | Hacker News Reader

Comment by peteforde | Hacker News Reader

I understand and in some ways share your enthusiasm. I think Dropbox could be the file I/O layer of the social web... if only they would publish a proper events API.

As it stands, the only way to receive updates is to poll for changes. This is a kludge at best (and takes away from the magic in a significant way in practice) and completely unrealistic at scale. That is, if I have a million users and I want to update every 15 seconds, Dropbox is going to (rightfully) shut my IP down.

If developers could define WebHooks to receive events, that'd be a great start. I'd happily pay for that.

If developers could subscribe to a WebSockets or event XMPP notification stream of updates, that'd be freaking amazing. I'd stand in line to pay for that. And that's when you'd see an explosion of applications (web, mobile and desktop) implementing Dropbox as their filesystem.

We've been asking nicely for years. If there's anyone here with pull or influence at Dropbox, please give us devs some real-time love. Otherwise, please add your voice to the choir:

http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=20226&replies=52#...

You can vote for it here: https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/5972/events-api

I too am hoping for an improvement that will scale to a million users. But here's what I do that should scale to tens of thousands decently:

I run dropboxd on my web server. Instead of using the API, users share a folder with my app. Dropboxd gets the stream of changes, and my app polls the local filesystem for changes instead of polling across the net.

Whoa, that's really smart. Going to try that!

How do you handle quotas?

I tell users to copy photos in, and they're deleted after upload.

Or even setting a callback URL for a file or folder that POSTs some JSON when the file changes. Simpler for everyone.

Parent addressed that: that's what a WebHook is.

That's what this means:

"If developers could define WebHooks to receive events, that'd be a great start. I'd happily pay for that."

Hm. Never seem that particular term used for it before. My mistake.

Mistakes are how we learn! :)

Below is a good write up by Timothy Fiz [1]. It's old, but it's still a good summary. He references GitHub, which is worth noting. GitHub allows developers to set webhooks for automated tasks that are triggered by repo events. It's a great reference implementation with good documentation [2].

1 - http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/what-webhooks-ar...

2 - http://help.github.com/post-receive-hooks/

I could build a Dropbox notification app in an afternoon or two, and sell it to you and a few thousand friends for $5/mo :)

Eric, ideas are cheap and execution is hard. I happen to believe that you're completely out to lunch if you think you could build this in a practical, scalable way that is useful in the ways I describe above.

However, I'm open minded and you seem confident — so if you believe that you're sitting on something, please feel free to share how you'd structure such a service. If you get it right, I'd pay you a lot more than $5, as long as it had the blessing of Dropbox (ie. doesn't get API throttled and isn't going to get cut after I integrate with your tool).

I was being facetious -- I do think a service like this could be built, but I am working on something else. Sorry if it came off offensive (I'm not out to lunch).

Really I meant to point out how the pattern of web apps connected via REST API to desktop folders/files is interesting and will enable a lot of data management schemes that were previously much harder or obscure.

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