A new SDK from Amazon will make it possible for Android and iOS developers to support Amazon Cloud Drive in their apps, says David Isbitski, principal evangelist at Amazon.
Included within the Amazon Mobile App SDK, the new Cloud Drive SDK shares some components with the former, such as to handle login in a homogeneous way. Furthermore, Isbitski says, developers will be able to use the Cloud Drive API “without ever needing to worry about networking code”.
The Cloud Drive SDK wraps entirely the Cloud Drive REST API so developers can use native Java and Objective-C objects and will not need to deal with JSON data not with the REST API documentation.
A typical call to get a list of files has the following form:
ACDSKListChildrenRequest *getChildrenRequest = [ACDSKListChildrenRequest new];
getChildrenRequest.parentID = node.nodeId;
...
ACDSKTask *getChildrenTask = [[ACDSKClient sharedInstance]
listChildren:getChildrenRequest fail:^(NSError *error) {
} success:^(ACDSKListChildrenResponse *response) {
ACDSKNode *rootNode = response.data.firstObject;
...
}];
The Cloud Drive SDK also implements a back-off strategy, an error handling strategy useful to deal with failed requests, e.g. when a high volume transfer causes the server to return a 5xx error, that is required by the Amazon app review process. Thus, developers targeting the Amazon app store will not need to worry themselves about it.
According to Brian P. Rubin, writing for ReadWrite, the Amazon Cloud Drive SDK could help make support for the Amazon Cloud Drive service more widely available in mobile apps and help it gain some traction in a highly competitive arena such as Cloud file storage among a plethora of other major players such as Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, etc.