cloudkit-js-demo

A look at CloudKit JS

Motivation

I use the iOS Notes app to scribble thoughts and lists and the iOS Reminders app for ToDos. Can the CloudKit Notes/Reminders backend-as-a-service power custom web applications or integrate with other web services?

Update: CloudKit JS doesn’t appear to offer a way to access Notes or Reminders via an API.

Links

• CloudKit JS homepage
• CloudKit Quick Start

Initial Thoughts

• Under the “Before You Begin” section:

  [C]reate an iOS or Mac app that uses CloudKit to store your app’s data.

  — https://developer.apple.com/documentation/cloudkitjs

  A developer must create a iOS or macOS app before using CloudKit JS?

• “cloudkit” on npmjs.com doesn’t appear to be an official package. Searching for “cloudkit” on npmjs.com doesn’t yield many results.

• There's no open CloudKit JS code on the github.com/apple org.

• The CloudKit JS library appears to be browser-only, and only available via Apple’s hosted script:

  Embed CloudKit JS in your webpage using the script tag and link to Apple’s hosted version of CloudKit JS at https://cdn.apple-cloudkit.com/ck/2/cloudkit.js.

  <script src="https://cdn.apple-cloudkit.com/ck/2/cloudkit.js">
  

  — https://developer.apple.com/documentation/cloudkitjs

• tsl-apple-cloudkit exists on typescriptlibs.org, but the source is untrustworthy.

• Questions for “cloudkit” and “javascript” on stackoverflow.com don’t yield many results (similar for “cloudkit-js” and “cloudkit-web-services”)

• CloudKit sounds like a service over CouchDB:

  An app has access to both a public and private database in each container. The public database is for storing user and app data that is shared between all instances of the app…There’s a private database for each user of your app, but the app only has access to the private database of the current user.

  — “Enabling CloudKit in Your App” on developer.apple.com

• Many of the developer.apple.com pages for CloudKit JS have a “this page no longer updated” message at the top.

• The “CloudKit Catalog: An Introduction to CloudKit (Cocoa and JavaScript)” is very outdated (“Version 6.0, 2016-09-13”) and contains an example with Node.js antipatterns and aged front-end web practices.

• The CloudKit JS API documentation is a little weird:

  • The sections include “Classes,” “Constants,” “Enumerations,” “Structures,” and pages refer to types as “dictionary”…this sounds like a native library!
  • Method documentation pages don’t include links to return types; in some cases the return type isn’t named.
  • Promise is a property? Modern browsers and Node.js have this as a native object.
  • Some classes appear to expose a property to identify their type, which is a little un-JavaScript-y (prefer instanceof or clearer data structures).

• CloudKit doesn’t seem to provide an API to Notes nor Reminders: a stackoverflow.com answer indicates that accessing via the web for a server is impossible.