Announcing the Openomy API v2.0

I'm very pleased to announce that today we're formally launching our new API (v2.0)! This is a huge step forward for Openomy, the developers using Openomy to develop applications, and the users of Openomy and participating applications.

The new API is much more "REST-compliant" (as opposed to our older, GETSful API) and should be much easier for developers to write applications against. It will also be much easier for us at Openomy to add features. We think our developers will greatly enjoy this new simplicity and ability to quickly iterate on your apps!

S3 Storage

Also with this launch, we're formally announcing that our default
storage engine is now Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). In addition to cutting costs, we believe using S3 will bring more peace of mind to our users and developers that their files are safe and secure in Amazon's data centers and will be highly available.

Achieving Our Vision

Launching both the new API as well as our new storage system completes a long process of rearchitecting our backend to allow us to grow more easily and iterate more quickly. The short-term benefits of this are quicker responses and higher uptime. The long-term benefits are allowing us to focus more closely on our vision of becoming the Online File System.

Over the past couple of years, as we predicted, the world is moving to an almost entirely web-based software model. We post our photos to Flickr, write our documents on Zoho, etc. Unfortunately, it's much too difficult for us to use our photos posted on Flickr within our documents on Zoho.

This is solved in the traditional desktop-based software model by the file system. Any application can access any file via a single API in the file system. There are (virtually) no data silos on the desktop. Any file is available for use by any application.

We're working to achieve this on the web. Our goal is to break down the data silos and allow applications to have access to all of a user's data. Moreover, we want the user to have full control over this. You deserve to be able to choose what applications have access to which data and have full data portability.

We believe this is the right model, and with these latest launches, you'll start to see this happening shortly!

P.S. Don't worry! The old APIs will stay on for a while, and we'll cover the deprecation process at a later time in another post.