James Ferreira - Google Apps Script: Web Application Development Essentials

If you are reading this book, there is a good chance you have heard of Google and its powerful office productivity suite, Google Apps. Google offers search, email, word processing, and hundreds of other cloud applications and services that are available to individuals but can scale all the way up to serve massive corporations and governments. As one of Googles most popular services, Google Apps offers some of the best online office products available; theyre an excellent example of web-based applications that outperform legacy desktop software.

This book is about Google Apps Script, which is a service that runs from Google Apps, like Sites and Documents. Google Apps Script is extremely powerful when automating many of the tasks required by day-to-day spreadsheet operations, but it also scales up to provide a complete application platform. If you are coming from a Microsoft Office environment, you can think of it as the macros for Google Docs, but unlike simple macros in MS Office, Google Apps Script has a mature online editor with all the features one would expect in a development platform. Unleash Google Scripts user interface capability and you can create entire data-driven websites and applications that run across most modern browsers, including mobile ones.

In addition to the integrated development environment (IDE), Google Apps Script comes with a manager for organizing scripts, built-in debugging, automatic code completion, timed event triggers, and automated revisioning, to name a few features. What really caught this authors attention was that everything is web-based. There is no need to download and configure a code editor or transport development files from computer to computer, wasting time resynchronizing files and reconnecting libraries. Simply sign into your Google account and start creating. Google Apps Scripts are written in JavaScript, so there is no need to compile the code, making application development very fast.

With its own set of libraries, Google Apps Script can interact with most of the services provided by Google, making it the Swiss Army knife behind the main products. Other application-building methods for accessing Google products, such as App Engine and the gData APIs (offered in many different languages), all require a place for you to develop and deploy your code. With Google Apps Script, you are building the code into the existing Google platform, and that provides a robust experience where your products inherit Googles legendary 99.9 percent availability. Because there is no need to have anything more than a basic Internet-connected browser, development on this platform is something anyone can get started with, without any up-front expense. Google Apps Script is not locked inside Google, where it can only talk to Google servers; rather, it can communicate through JDBC, JSON, and SOAP, and it has a urlFetch method, making it very versatile when communicating across the Web.

At Google I/O 2012 a new feature called HTML Service was unveiled, giving Google Apps Script programmers the ability to build custom user interfaces that can run inside a spreadsheet window as a Google gadget or completely independently in a browser. Talk about earth-shattering: a cloud programing platform that can access just about any web-based service and has the ability to create AJAX-style web pages? That is noteworthy. To date, Google Apps Script is the only way to gain full access to Gmail at the message level, and more services are added every year.

This book will focus on teaching you how to build powerful web applications using Google Apps Script. It is laid out in sections that explain how the different parts of Google Apps Script work and puts all these together in a series of fully functional applications that you can put to work right away.