Thursday, March 30, 2017

Java API for nextCloud/ownCloud

Java API for nextCloud

Currently the nextCloud and ownCloud solutions have a very big drive in the market. One of the main reason is, that you have control over your data.

When you look at recent events and news, then we can confirm this.
In our company we have been using ownCloud/nextCloud since version 5.x and have a long positive history with the solution.
We also provide managed nextCloud solutions, for sharing data with your customers for example, as backup back end and many other use cases.

The use case

To integrate nextCloud in your business processes, you sometimes need to automate things a bit more than what is included out of the box.
If possible we do this with shell scripts, but for complexer work flows, this isn't enough.
In those cases we use the full power of server side java applications.
Unfortunately the API of nextCloud is not fully REST/Webdav, it has some parts (Mainly file sharing and provisioning) which work with a XML style interface.

The java integration

To be able to use these API also from java applications, we have created a API library which exposes the important parts for simple usage in java applications.
To give back something to the open source community, we have decided to publish the library under the GPL license, so it can be used by other applications.
You can find the library source on github, and feedback and additions to the api are appreciated.


Happy coding