Is it possible to use Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydr

Question

I'm creating an app that connects online to a server to collect information. To save money from renting server space from a big corp, I was wondering if any of these free services (Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft Skydrive, Amazon Cloud, etc.) could be potentially used as server space?

I pretty much want a "space" or "cloud" where people can connect to to collect data. Example: I have a weather app, and there is files on my server and I update the files according to the weather. I would like them to be able to open the app and connect to my server to gather the weather data saved on my server. It really won't be much digital space, so I didn't want to pay bookoo bucks when I could potentially use a free service like Dropbox.

Answer 1

Check out site44. It allows you to connect with dropbox and use a friendly URL (own domain or otherwise) for accessing the files.

Answer 2

I'm sure you can use Dropbox. But only if you want to download or upload some files. And I'm not sure if it's ideal. But there are other alternatives you may want to look at. Like you can use GoogleAppEngine if you want some processing to be done on server. Maybe Parse.com is another choice but not sure if it fits your needs.

Answer 3

You can't execute remote code on any of those services (that I'm aware of), but you could certainly save files to them. For example, you could write out text files (CSV? XML? JSON?) to those locations.

Take a look at the Dropbox SDK for details on how to integrate it to your iOS or Android project. It's pretty simple.

Here's a basic code sample for uploading a file:

NSString *localPath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"Info" ofType:@"plist"];
NSString *filename = @"Info.plist";
NSString *destDir = @"/";
[[self restClient] uploadFile:filename toPath:destDir withParentRev:nil fromPath:localPath];

Answer 4

I would recommend using something like Parse.com as your backend. Their free tier lets you store 1GB. Maybe not as much as Dropbox, but the API for Parse is great and made for storing/retrieving from mobile apps. You'll be up and running really fast. I haven't looked at Dropbox SDK though.

Answer 5

I heard several times that it's working, but hadn't made my own experience yet.

Check out this post http://lifehacker.com/5528104/use-dropbox-to-share-and-host-your-web-site

As Axeva said you can't run your own scripts or sql. You have to write your own workaround.

Answer 6

Dropbox works fine if all you want to do is using it as an FTP to put some JSON or XML files on.

Just be sure to put it in your dropbox's 'public' folder and requesting the public link.