Andrew Rea - A Developer On A Few Platforms

I have spoken a couple of times to someone at work about Google Docs and they were mentioning how good it would be if there was support similar to what you have with Drop Box and of course I agreed.  So it got me thinking and I have done a little, *tiny*, research just out of sheer interest. 

The language I would choose

In a perfect world I would like to say I could build this cross platform application using C++ but unfortunately my skills are not at the level where I can just jump in and code.  I am thinking about using either:

• Java
• .NET (With Mono in mind for X Platform)

I am not to sure of the exact deployment requirements for both Java and .NET Mono so I shall leave this point currently at the stage of I would use either.

The service

To work in a similar fashion to Drop Box we would need functionality where by we can have a simple set up to select a folder which will be sync'd, and a service running which will detect :

• File Creation
• File Update
• File Delete

I have read somewhere about meta data on the API so it would not be a bad to reflect file meta data when they change also.  This is where the deployment would differ each platform has a different way of setting up and handling services of course.

The API

http://code.google.com/apis/documents/docs/3.0/developers_guide_protocol.html

As you will read the API provides the necessary methods to develop core functionality we would require to reflect that of Drop Box.  Once of the main things which you will need before you can get anything of the ground is Authentication.  There is a section for Client Login which is what we will need for the installed Application.

Progressing Synchronization

At any stage it needs to be possible to see the current progress of any synchronization that is ongoing, complete or has failed.  My thoughts for this, and I am not a GUI GURU, was having a context menu over a system icon in the task bar which might say - Synchronization Status.  I would then envisage may be a three tab interface with the tab headings of:

• In Progress
• Complete
• Failed

Each tab would contain a data grid to display the file paths and I would give the following context menus. 

In Progress Tab

Cancel Menu Item

Failed Tab

Retry Menu Item

I am thinking that the complete tab would simply show the last 100 completed actions or something simply for immediate reference. So because of that would not require a context menu.

Is there anything like this currently out there.  I hope so, if not?  Damn cool project to open source and get collaboration on, and ultimately use!!

Cheers for now,

Andrew