Thursday, September 15, 2011

Three new APIs for Google Apps Script

Jacob
Gustavo
By Jacob Moshenko and Gustavo Moura, Software Engineers

In January of this year we launched BigQuery integration with Google Apps Script. What we didn’t mention was that we were building this on top of our Google APIs Discovery Service. Thanks to the ease and flexibility of writing clients based on this API, today we’re announcing integration with three more APIs, and revamping our BigQuery support.

As of now, we have also integrated the Tasks API, Prediction API, and URL Shortener API in addition to the BigQuery API. You can now include these APIs in your scripts, apps, and sites pages. As with other Apps Script services, we handle all of the server communications as well as authorization, which makes this a great way to build mashups and workflows using our APIs.

To get started, simply enable the APIs you’re interested in from the "Use Google API services" menu in the script editor.


Using this feature will prompt you to save your script. Once you have done so, the Google APIs Services dialog will appear and you can choose which APIs to use, which versions to use, and what name to use when referencing them from your scripts.


After you complete this step, the API methods will be automatically populated as you type using the standard Apps Script autocomplete mechanism. For detailed information about each API, visit our reference documentation. We have also created a tutorial with a simple, fun application to help you get started using scripts.

As we iron out this new technology and listen to your feedback we plan to aggressively integrate even more APIs. If you have any questions or experience any problems let us know on our support forum.

Jacob Moshenko is a Software Engineer working on the Google APIs developer experience. He believes that Google APIs should be easy to use, especially from Google platforms.

Gustavo Moura has been a Software Engineer at Google since 2007. He has been part of the Google Docs team since 2009. Prior to that, he worked on AdWords.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

6 comments:

  1. This is fantastic. Google has created a platform that makes even application development not only possible but easy on the cloud.

    I would like to see further development on UI creation as well!

    Well done, Google!

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  2. I spent much time learning how to integrate App Scripts into Google Doc apps. I made some cool stuff but Google Docs has throttles and fails often. Then I found App Scripts UI builder which was awesome. I was stuck when it came to how to connect UI elements with actions and scripts. I wish it was as easy as the visual code block editor in Google AppInventorBeta.com! I made an Android App that has 130,000 downloads and 20,000 active users. I want to make awesome web apps also!

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  3. When are you planning to launch Google plus Apps??

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  4. Thanks for your work. Hope you'll include support Google Apps script for Google Storage soon (to make it possible to upload/download big files on Google Sites).

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  5. Please make a tutorial on how to use Prediction API in Spreadsheets. I have spent a week trying to figure it out and am now stuck on steaming updates. Doesn't seem that any of the auto complete choices build an update command properly. Please help!

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