Open files from a web application with another web application?

Question

So these days we want things to be on the cloud.

In the desktop area we could use one application to create a file, then another to open that file.

I wonder how you accomplish this file sharing between web applications?

Eg. if I create a web application letting the user create a file, how do I share this file to another web application for opening it? Maybe the user created a PDF file on my web application and when he clicks on it, I want this file to be opened using another web application - but is not mine - so that he doesn't need to download it to open it.

Is there a standard way of sharing files between web applications easily?

Im not asking about pure technologies that could make this possible eg. REST/json, but standard specification/implementation for sharing files between applications. Cause I haven't heard of this kind of implementation, which could be good for cloud services to eliminate the need of having to download everything.

Answer 1

Application A assigns an URL to the file, hands the URL over to application B and application B uses HTTP to retrieve the file via the URL. If both applications are running on the same server, this will be just as efficient as reading from a file from the file system, or from a database.