Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by giarc » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 9:30 PM UTC

sadrasabouri wrote: post #32

Reading the documentation, I was expecting more tbh. As I found out there is no way to customize the API. The response is always a JSON dump of that google Sheet.

I found the docs pretty minimal as well. Ironic since they specifically called out Google for shallow docs in the description.

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

#52

Post by jumploops » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 9:52 PM UTC

Neat! This seems very similar to Sheety[0], which I've used a bunch of times before (and found a few bugs...).

Do you have any plans to open source?

[0]https://sheety.co

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

#53

Post by hot_gril » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 9:52 PM UTC

The link is broken. Says "no https for this domain"

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

#54

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 9:53 PM UTC

vhiremath4 wrote: post #27

Funny story. Before pivoting my startup to Loom, we were a user testing company named Opentest. Instead of spinning up a DB and creating a dashboard for my co-founders to look at who requested certain user tests, I just dumped everything into a Google Sheet. It was so good. No downtime. Open access. Only 3 people looking/editing, so no conflict. Didn't have to deal with database upgrades or maintenance. I often think…

[deleted]

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

#55

Post by hot_gril » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 9:54 PM UTC

vhiremath4 wrote: post #27

Funny story. Before pivoting my startup to Loom, we were a user testing company named Opentest. Instead of spinning up a DB and creating a dashboard for my co-founders to look at who requested certain user tests, I just dumped everything into a Google Sheet. It was so good. No downtime. Open access. Only 3 people looking/editing, so no conflict. Didn't have to deal with database upgrades or maintenance. I often think…

Google Sheets is the backbone of several projects I work on, even though I'm a SWE at a large company. It's used as a fronend in some places or a backend in others. But part of this is because we have too much red tape around using simple eng tools like React or Postgres.

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

#56

Post by hot_gril » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 9:57 PM UTC

internetter wrote: post #40

RockRobotRock wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really want to deal with caching logic for what should be a simple API call? Sounds like a convincing argument to use whatever this product is.

client = (APIcall) => redis.get(sha1(APIcall)) || { res = api(APIcall); redis.set(sha1(APIcall),res) return res } Not that hard. Like 10 lines of code to get a decentish cache going.

Assuming you have Redis

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

#57

Post by londons_explore » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 10:01 PM UTC

Google apps script already lets you write http handlers...

They seem pretty powerful.

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

#58

Post by pcthrowaway » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 10:05 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #57

Google apps script already lets you write http handlers... They seem pretty powerful.

Do you know of any docs on this?

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

#59

Post by stephenbez » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 10:06 PM UTC

ctrlaltdylan wrote: post #4

Is the Google Sheets API rate limit open enough for actual production use? I thought it was pretty restrictive, no more than 60 writes per minute, but I'm not sure about the reads restrictions.

I used Google Sheets as a data source that business people could update, but eventually we moved away from it as we found it unreliable. We would get an occasional error (maybe a 429) even though we were polling the sheet once a minute (we had a few other sheets that polled once every few minutes).

This manifested as an issue when doing a deploy but being unable to get critical data. We added retries and stuff like that but it seemed not great to run a business of something that isn’t designed for this purpose.

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

#60

Post by phantompeace » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 10:12 PM UTC

hgyjnbdet wrote: post #8

office_drone wrote: post #6

I'd like to plug PocketBase [0] for a similar use case. Last week I was looking for a place to store random data with API access, and was looking at making a Google Sheets backend, but PocketBase was easy and didn't have a 60 rpm quota [1]. Deploying to a cheap VPS was very easy with CapRover. [0] https://pocketbase.io/ [1] https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/limits

I was looking at pocketbase but I didn't really understand how to use it. I know sqlite and am good at SQL, but couldn't work out how to use it.

You need to query/write using HTTPS requests