Nextcloud founders Frank Karlitschek and Bjoern Schießle invented the Federated Cloud Sharing API when still at ownCloud, and pushed the solution as a collaboratively developed standard under the Open Cloud Mesh initiative of the GÉANT Association, a European collaboration on e-infrastructure and services for research and education. Nextcloud formally joined this project shortly after it was booted up and, like with many other things, Frank and Bjoern intended to continue to push forward cross-cloud collaboration under the OCM umbrella.
That push includes bringing the API to a stable, 1.0 version, suitable for wider implementation.
The Next Level
In his blog about the history and future of Cloud Federation, Bjoern mentioned ambitious goals and additions to federated sharing like sharing address books, calendars and real-time audio/video and chat communication across servers. With Nextcloud offering these features, the need for this is clear enough and the team is looking into the right way to do that. But such a project needs a solid foundation and bringing the OCM API to a solid 1.0 is very much a step that needs to be made.
Bjoern has been developing an extensive and detailed proposal for this, which can be found on github. It adds a number of basic abilities like distinguishing between sender and owner of a share (which helps with re-sharing), a simplification that allows users to share to display name instead of the complicated Federated Cloud ID, and a series of proposals to keep the protocol easy to maintain.
He also defined notifications and actually removed one of the capabilities of the API, GET requests, for privacy reasons.
An important element of this specification is that it is backward compatible so the hundreds of thousands of existing Nextcloud servers, as well as the many Pydio and ownCloud servers, can continue to be part of the federated network even when some start to upgrade to the new version!
A first implementation
This is, of course, a first draft, but code often speaks louder than specifications in open source, so Bjoern went ahead and developed an implementation in Nextcloud, which is already open for review.
Draft needs input!
It is now up to the stakeholders in the OCM community to provide their feedback and be part of the new 1.0 project. If you’re interested in federated technology, have a look at the API and share your thoughts!
We updated Nextcloud server releasing updates for Hub 4, 6, and 7. With current update, Hub 4 reaches its end of life. We recommend you to update your Nextcloud, as it is always a quick and safe process.
We are excited to announce SpaceNet as a new sponsor of the Nextcloud Enterprise Day, a leading provider offering tailored Nextcloud hosting solutions that ensure robust security, efficiency, and data sovereignty.
Salviamo alcuni cookie per contare i visitatori e rendere il sito più facile da usare. Questi dati non lasciano il nostro server e non servono a tracciare il tuo profilo personale! Per maggiori informazioni, consulta la nostra Informativa sulla privacy. Personalizza
I cookie statistici raccolgono informazioni in forma anonima e ci aiutano a capire come i visitatori utilizzano il nostro sito web. Utilizziamo Matomo on-premises
Matomo
_pk_ses*: Conta la prima visita dell'utente
_pk_id*: Aiuta a non contare due volte le visite.