drops

drops is a simple file sharer. At this stage it's a prototype concept for edgenet.

The use case is as follows:

• A number of mobile devices are connected to the same WiFi cell
• All the devices are running the drops application
• We monitor a specific directory on each device, say /sdcard/DCIM
• When a new file is created in that directory, we share that file with all peers

The test scenario is taking a photo with one device and seeing that photo appear on another.

Goals

The main goal of this prototype concept is to get a minimum end-to-end example of a cell-based application, that is:

• Two phones connected over a single WiFi hotspot, where
• One of the phones is acting as access point
• Content created on either phone will flow to the other

The drops application will be an Android application that wraps up a drops service written in C. So additional goals are:

• To test the tool chain for building Android apps that wrap C libraries in JNI layers
• To test and demo Zyre, the library that does discovery and messaging over WiFi
• To give contributors some code to get their teeth into.

Technical Design

The drops app has these layers (I guess):

• An Android application, "drops", which provides a start/stop UI
• A C library, "libdrops", which does the heavy lifting
• A JNI layer that wraps libdrops and makes it available to the Java code

The libdrops library has these primary dependencies:

• Zyre (libzyre) from http://zyre.com.
• CZMQ (libczmq) from http://czmq.zeromq.org
• ZeroMQ v4 (libzmq) from http://zeromq.org
• Sodium (libsodium) from https://github.com/jedisct1/libsodium

Ownership and Contributing

drops is owned by all its authors and contributors. This is an open source project licensed under the LGPLv3. To contribute to drops please read the C4.1 process that we use.