Good news all around for JavaScript app developers! Since we introduced CORS for all apps on 5apps a few weeks ago, some of the most popular cloud storage providers subsequently did exactly the same, with a few of them even going a little bit further.
First, Amazon and Dropbox announced CORS support for Amazon S3 and the Dropbox API, and yesterday Google followed suit with CORS support for Google Drive.
The Dropbox team even went so far as to release dropbox.js, a JavaScript library, which makes it very easy to develop client-side apps with Dropbox as a storage backend, including helpers for handling the OAuth authentication.
Although we here at 5apps, as one of the first remoteStorage providers, would love to see the adoption of more decentralized, open standards for cloud storage, we think that these are all steps in the right direction, constituting good progress for client-side app developers in general.
What’s more, it shows that the movement towards shifting most user-facing software to the Web platform is in full swing, and today we’re only at the beginning of a long and interesting journey. Enabling JavaScript apps to communicate properly with backends on other domains is a vital prerequisite for separating apps from data once again, and with these upgrades, we now have three more cloud storage options for client-side apps. And battle-tested ones with hundreds of millions of users at that.
If you’re interested in the details, check out the original announcements, and let us know what you think in the comments or on Twitter: