I'm using the dropboxd service under Linux, which requires you to log into their website e.g. https://www.dropbox.com/cli_link?host_id=2173bf325f94beee3b1879d2c7b49e69 to link the machine to your account.
Is there any programatic way to do this (ideally using Java)? To access the website above it seems you need to login using forms (which seems tricky to do programatically), and their basic REST API (https://www.dropbox.com/developers/core/docs) doesnt seem to cover the cli_link command.
I could write an app to do the sync using their full API, but it seems like overkill since aside from the cli_link requirement the basic dropboxd does all that I need.
The official Dropbox desktop client is unrelated to the API, though both the API and the Linux CLI require user interaction on the Dropbox web site (once per link) to authorize the linking. Also, note that automating/scraping the site itself is not allowed by the terms:
https://www.dropbox.com/terms#acceptable_use
Not really a solution for DropBox users, but in the end we just moved over to use MediaFire instead. That has a full REST API and doesnt require any manual intervention.
Related
I am trying to authenticate a user inside a desktop application using the web api. I am not using a browser, I am using straight up GET and PUSH calls to the endpoints of the Spotify servers. Immediately I ran into some problems. It appears that upon the initial GET command to "accounts.spotify.com", the returned response includes HTML with a javascript function that runs and is responsible for dynamically generating HTML that you see on the initial login page. If you look at the Javascript function, it is clear that this is what is going on, however, you can also see this code is obfuscated and not meant to be used by us, the developers! (Link to Javascript code here for reference: Javascript function)
So my question is, while I can probably reverse engineer the code to get this working, would this be against the Spotify developer TOS?
Thanks!
Spotify's authentication happens through oauth, and a big part of user authentication as per the oauth rfc is where the user delegates permissions to your app to carry out API calls that affect their account, or return information about them. That's the web page you're seeing - it must be presented to your users so that they can delegate permissions so that Spotify can give your app an access token. It doesn't necessarily need to happen in a browser - it can happen in a web view inside your desktop application - but it does need to be loaded over https, and your application must not alter or reverse engineer the Spotify permissions delegations page.
As you correctly guessed, reverse engineering any Spotify APIs is against terms of service.
For more information on authorization on the Spotify platform, I'd recommend having a look at this guide.
Hope that helps! Please ping me if you have any more questions.
Hugh
Spotify Developer Support
I have two public folders in my google drive and I want my app to be able read images from one folder and read and write images to another folder. Is there a way to do this using the google api or any GET method and hopefully without needing to authorize or authenticate the user's google account? Thank you!
It's a cross platform application being developed in Lua using the Corona sdk
Unfortunately, you cannot access a particular drive without any authentication/authorization.
Every request your application sends to the Drive API must include an
authorization token. The token also identifies your application to
Google.
Same question was also raised in this SO post.
But there is an alternative if you go further in the answer of the SO post. This link maybe useful if you want to try the alternative.
I'm trying to use Instapaper's Simple API (http://www.instapaper.com/api/simple).
The API terms of use (http://www.instapaper.com/api/terms) says apps should not store user id and password, and I don't want to store them either. However, it seems that the only way to add a link to a user's Instapaper via simple API is to store the username/password (if the user does have a password).
Am I missing something?
The API terms of use state that:
Apps must not store users’ passwords. Passwords may only be collected for the xAuth token acquisition and must be discarded afterward.
Only the full API uses xAuth tokens. The above sentence doesn't apply to the simple API, since it uses Basic HTTP Authentication.
You still "must make reasonable efforts to prevent passwords from being compromised, and must not disclose passwords to any other services or individuals".
If you are using a native Mac application (like Apple’s Mail client or a third-party mail client like Airmail) there isn’t an easy way to save a link to Instapaper without first opening the link in a browser and then using one of Instapaper’s browser extensions to actually save the article.
One workaround that I’ve found to expedite this task is to write a service for OS X which uses Instapaper’s API to save links.
In order to write your own service, first open Apple’s Automator application and create a new Service. Then, drag the Run Shell Script action into the application’s main workflow area.
Make sure the service receives no input, can be used by any application, and that the shell script is set to run python.
I'm using Java with Google Plus API. I'm using OAuth 2.0. When a user is authenticated, an access code is returned in a browser. Now, given that the code must accompany a call to the Google Plus API, I currently have to manually copy the code and use it in making calls to the Google Plus API. What I wish to do, however, is to programmatically retrieve this code; eliminate the manual copying.
Any assistance will be highly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
It sounds like you're writing a command line or some other non-web application that uses the Google+ API. This throws a little bit of a wrench into the token delivery via HTTP redirect. Without the redirect there's no way for the OAuth web pages to communicate with your code and hence you must copy and paste it.
There is one work around that seems to work pretty well. You can set up a local web server, such as an embedded Jetty, and complete the OAuth flow by redirecting the user back to their locally running web server.
You can see an example of this implemented in oacurl which is hosted here: http://code.google.com/p/oacurl/
I was asked to build a control-system for a Ebay-like Finnish auction-site huuto.net.
The system would reopen closed auctions by a specific rules. It would be completely external from the main site, running at an external website.
The site is however unwilling to release its API and Schema. I know no way to build such a system without knowing its API.
How do you build an internet site without its API and Schema?
You could try some form of automatic browsing: mechanize
Edit:
Examples here.
I think you're asking about building a site that interacts with another site without using a well-defined API. Is that right?
You can interact with an external site without using an official API - in order to do so, you need to imitate a normal site visitor and send your requests to the site frontend (in much the same way as a web crawler does). Tools like hpricot, mechanize and curl can help you parse the content of pages and send requests, but in doing so your system may be quite brittle. Any change to the target site might mean you have to rewrite portions of your system.
It might be possible to get the data you need by screen scraping the site. You could perform the operations you want to do by POSTing data into their forms or using a WebClient type API to make your program act like a web browser but that's likely to be an extremely brittle solution.
Honestly though, without an API, there really is no good solution.
you either need access to the database or an API, otherwise no point in even trying.