Now I'm doing a distributed systems homework in Java, so I need to access one copy of configuration file from several computers. And now I could read and parse a shared file from dropbox webpage, like this one: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ysn9yivqj7kwo0w/config.yaml. What I want to do is to add a daemon thread to detect whether this file has been changed or not, if changed, I need to re-config every node of system.
But how can I judge whether this file has been changed or not IN PROGRAM, without downloading the whole file and then to do some diff? I think dropbox should add something like timestamps to files, but how can I get access to this timestamp?
Any suggestion is welcome, much thanks!