Zinc

Zinc is asset distribution system for designed mobile apps. Common use cases are for downloading content purchased through an in-app-purchase mechanism, or to avoid packaging large files inside your app package if they may not be needed.

The central concept in Zinc is a "bundle", which is just a group of assets. For example, a bundle could be a level for a game, which includes spritesheets, background music, and metadata.

Zinc bundles are also versioned, which means they can be updated. For example, if you wanted to change the background music in a game, you can do that by pushing a new version of that bundle.

Finally, Zinc also has a notion of "distributions" for a bundles, which are basically just tags. This allows clients to track a tag such as master instead of the version directly. Then whenever the master distribution is updated, clients will automatically download the changes.

Feature Highlights

• Files are tracked by content. If the same file exists in multiple bundles or versions, it is only stored once.
• "CDN Compatible" meaning that a Zinc catalog can be hosted on a dumb file server.

Status

Zinc is in the early development stage should be consider 'alpha' at best.

Clients

• Objective-C_
• Java_

.. _Objective-C: https://github.com/mindsnacks/Zinc-ObjC/ .. _Java: https://github.com/mindsnacks/JavaZinc/

Credits

• Distribute_
• Buildout_
• modern-package-template_

.. _Buildout: http://www.buildout.org/ .. _Distribute: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/distribute .. _modern-package-template: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/modern-package-template

License

Zinc is distributed under a BSD-style license.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE.