[Owncloud] Re: Dropbox-like syncing

[Rob Hoelz]

On Jan 20, 2011, at 8:22 PM, Matthew Dawson wrote:

> On Thursday 20 January 2011 17:08:18 Rob Hoelz wrote:
>> Hello!
>> 
>> I recently heard about OwnCloud, and I'd like to start using it as a
>> replacement for Dropbox.  Obviously, this functionality isn't there
>> yet, but I was hoping to contribute in that area.  What kind of work
>> has been done for Dropbox-like syncing?  Are there notes on how the
>> OwnCloud team plans on going about this?
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Rob
>> 
> 
> Hey,
> 
> I've started working on a custom client + ownCloud plugin to support such functionality.  I haven't uploaded my code so far (its only in the beginning stages), but I can push my git repos to my scratch area if you are interested in taking a look.  My eventual ideal solution would include rsync like file transfer and 2 way push notification of any file changes.
> 
> Matthew

Awesome, I'd definitely like to take a look at that!

What I was thinking was to have a client-side daemon that uses inotify/kqueue to pick up changes to files in a folder.  Using dbus, that daemon can send notifications to interested applications on the user's system (ex. systray, libnotify).  The daemon could also use a socket connection back to an OwnCloud instance to listen for changes that other clients have pushed in.

That last part could be problematic, though.  Since it's a web application, I was thinking we could use Comet or some other long polling technique, but PHP and long polling don't play nice with some web servers.  We could use another daemon running on the web server machine.  How the web application would signal a change to that daemon, I don't know yet.

-Rob