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Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

(www.zerosheets.com)
356 points joaovcoliveira | 1 comments | 12 Apr 24 16:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.276s | 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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seanhunter ◴[13 Apr 24 06:46 UTC] No.40021079[source]▶
Just beware of the modern version of the "Excel noob trap" which lots of investment banks fell into in the 80s and 90s. Spreadsheets are amazing generic calculating frameworks and you can do a ton in them, so a lot of banks ended up building a huge ediface of excel spreadsheets that ran a wide variety of risk, pricing and operational functions.

With a few plugins and extensions you can really do amazing things with this type of setup. The problem is that your spreadsheets basically become an unmaintainable and impenetrable nightmare and all your business logic is held hostage in various people's personal sheets. Making wide changes becomes hard/impossible and doing something that in a traditional software framework would be easy ("Let's change the frobnicator to twizzle first and then twozzle afterwards, instead of the other way round as it does it now") become very difficult requiring many many changes in many many sheets with a lot of risk, and a lot of dilligence to be sure you have actually made a particular critical fix everywhere.

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Karellen ◴[13 Apr 24 12:29 UTC] No.40022719[source]▶
> Making wide changes becomes hard/impossible

To add to this - no revision control.

OK, maybe you can store your spreadsheets in a RCS, but can you get diffs of the changes, so you can confirm the revision you're about to push is what you meant to do? Can you review the history of diffs, so you can see how the system has changed over time? If multiple people make changes, can you do a merge? Do you even have a separate "working copy" where you can try stuff out, or are you just editing the production copy with no safety harness?

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1. mananaysiempre ◴[13 Apr 24 12:46 UTC] No.40022803[source]▶
Only thinking of this now, but a flat OpenDocument shreadsheet (“FODS”, a single XML file, unlike the usual XMLs-in-ZIP flavor) should actually be amenable to text-based version control.