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Exiv2 and Cloud Services » History » Revision 2

Revision 1 (Tuan Nhu, 17 Aug 2013 09:15) → Revision 2/7 (Tuan Nhu, 19 Aug 2013 06:03)

h1. Exiv2 and Cloud Services

h2. 1. Introduction

This article is to share my investigations about some of cloud services and suggest the way to integrate them into Exiv2. The investigated cloud services are Google Drive and Dropbox, which are the most popular services. As enterprises integrate their existing IT infrastructures and IT resources with the sharable cloud paradigm, it is imperative for cloud enablers to provide a uniform API that these enterprises can use to tailor the cloud to their business processes. Hence, the way we integrate Google Drive and Dropbox into Exiv2 should be applicable to other cloud services.

h2. 2. Architecture

Most of cloud services provide Representational State Transfer (RESTful) API to allow users to perform the operations (view, edit, delete, share, …) on their resources.
The API is mostly based on the HTTP/HTTPS protocol and GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE requests may be all used. The API presupposes no particular structure in the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) space. The starting point is a URI, supplied by the cloud service provider, that identifies the cloud itself. The cloud's representation contains URIs for the other resources in the cloud. Operations on the cloud resources are performed by making an HTTP request against the URI of the resource.
Before accessing the API, the applications are required to ask users to authenticate as well as authorize the permission to access the user data. Most of the cloud services use OAuth 2.0 to do that.

The following is the way we should integrate the cloud services to Exiv2.