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356 points joaovcoliveira | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.211s | source

Hello everyone!

At a company I worked for, we needed to develop an MVP (basically a web page) and apply certain business logic to a Google Drive spreadsheet that was frequently updated by the Sales team.

In this case, we had two options:

Develop a backend to replace the current spreadsheet and have the sales team use it as a new "backoffice" - This would take a very long time, and if the hypothesis we were testing was wrong, it would be time wasted.

Create the web page and use Google's SDK to extract data from the spreadsheet.

We chose to go with the second option because it was quicker. Indeed, it was much faster than creating a new backoffice. But not as quick as we imagined. Integrating with Google's SDK requires some effort, especially to handle the OAuth logic, configure it in the console, and understand the documentation (which is quite shallow, by the way).

Anyway! We did the project and I realized that maybe other devs might have encountered similar issues. Therefore, I developed a tool that transforms Google spreadsheets into "realtime APIs" with PATCH, GET, POST, and DELETE methods.

Since it's a product for devs, I think it would be cool to hear your opinions. It's still quite primitive, but the basic features already work.

https://zerosheets.com

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yangff ◴[] No.40020119[source]
You don't actaully need any fancy wrapping.. just open https://script.google.com/ you can already access all google's APIs + you will be able to integrate your sheets with your gmail (send email), calendar (you can modify the calendar when the sheet get changes), create pages, allow inputs from form and etc..) The problem with that is the sheet will not have any .. transaction based ops like a real database so for example you want to lock certain resources.. you may fail..
replies(1): >>40020187 #
forgotmypwlol ◴[] No.40020187[source]
Every time someone makes a simple solution for a problem on this website someone else points out that a much more complicated option already exists.
replies(6): >>40020324 #>>40020839 #>>40020944 #>>40020975 #>>40021239 #>>40023085 #
1. throwaway290 ◴[] No.40020944[source]
It's not a simple solution if it suggests replacing one API with two APIs (sheets + this wrapper). It defeats the point of going with Sheets. Both APIs can break now.