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Show HN: Turn a Google Spreadsheet into an API

sheetsu.com

21–30 of 103 posts

Re: Show HN: Turn a Google Spreadsheet into an API

#21
post #16

1. How to get columns? 2. Your docs say: http://sheetsu.com/apis/12345/column/:column_name Is ':' a documentation convention somewhere that I've not come across? I tried: http://sheetsu.com/apis/12345/column/:Email http://sheetsu.com/apis/12345/column/:email until I realised it was just: http://sheetsu.com/apis/12345/column/Email

':' is not that uncommon. E.g.: http://mojolicio.us/perldoc/Mojolicious/Guides/Routing#Stand...

Re: Show HN: Turn a Google Spreadsheet into an API

#22
post #19

That's nice - I've recently made a small project to wrap Github's Gists around an open API[1] for the same use case - a small open database easily browseable -, but your project seems much more interesting - spreadsheets are a very interesting way to solve this. Good job. [1] https://github.com/arcanis/gist-proxy-server

Whoa, gists as a DB - that's a neat idea!

Re: Show HN: Turn a Google Spreadsheet into an API

#25
post #23

Cool. Is there any API rate limit?

Right now, it's Google Drive Quota. I'm testing out the idea, etc. If it goes well I'll probably cut rate limits per user or per API.

But google throttles requests to popular docs right? I mean, the "Wow, this file seems very popular" thingy... Is there any way to calculate it? Maybe you could pass JMeter [0] or bench-rest [1] so we can have some numbers for orientation?

Anyways, it's really handy for simple and non traffic-intensive projects. Well done!

[0] http://jmeter.apache.org/

[1] https://github.com/jeffbski/bench-rest

Re: Show HN: Turn a Google Spreadsheet into an API

#26
Slightly unrelated but - isn't there a super cost-effective way of quickly whipping up a CRUD API with minimal configuration? Often I implement fairly backends in Java or Go that could might as well have been "configured" from the beginning, instead of implemented each time.

Re: Show HN: Turn a Google Spreadsheet into an API

#27
Google Spreadsheets is awesome as a quick and dirty CMS. I use it all the time at the newspaper i work for, in combination with Tabletop (https://github.com/jsoma/tabletop). Only thing i lack right now is some kind of library that could cache those sheets using Redis for speed.

Re: Show HN: Turn a Google Spreadsheet into an API

#28
Really great start! I could see this being very useful.

If you were to extend the functionality to include full CRUD on entities, I think I would start using it immediately on some proof of concept work.

For instance, being able to GET, PUT/PATCH, and DELETE by id (or per row) would be awesome.

Thanks again for the nice MVP work!

Re: Show HN: Turn a Google Spreadsheet into an API

#29
post #27

Google Spreadsheets is awesome as a quick and dirty CMS. I use it all the time at the newspaper i work for, in combination with Tabletop ( https://github.com/jsoma/tabletop ). Only thing i lack right now is some kind of library that could cache those sheets using Redis for speed.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Turn a Google Spreadsheet into an API

#30
post #15

Ah man, this is perfect! finally a way to get simple servers running with very little hassle. One major feature I would like is the ability to specify cells for I/O. Eg in some sort of "my api" console I could say "/custom_api, {stuff:A5, things:A6}, B2". Then requests to GET /custom_api would plug in the key-value of "stuff" into A5 and "things" into A6 and then respond with whatever is in B2. Once more useful featu…

You can do that with SpreadServe[1] now. Instead of Google docs it uses real Excel .xls spreadsheets and supports VBA and XLL addins. It turns your spreadsheets into async scriptable servers. There are Python & Java APIs.

[1] http://spreadserve.com

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