I'm surprised no one's posted Spread API yet: https://spreadapi.roombelt.com/ It's a free Google Sheets / Apps Script you just paste to your sheet, and it turns the sheet into a full CRUD. It's kind of rate limited though but completely free! Edit: I've thought about creating a company around Sheets before, and the problem is that once you get to the "willing to pay" stage, you also kind of outgrow Sheets. I'd rather…
Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app
121–130 of 171 posts
Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Me too! I've normalized it in our organizations. We use a combination of app scripts and what we call "Single Button Apps" that are web pages that have a text box (paste the URL of the Gsheet) and a "go" button. The input and output are all in the sheet, but putting the button in a web app makes it easy to iterate on feature set as/if the application grows. https://blog.adambuilds.com/sba-not-spa-the-most-minimal-ui
I read your comment and your blog post and I still don't understand what happens when I put a link to a sheet in the text box and click Go.. what happens? You say your inputs and outputs are all in the sheet.. ok.. what does the button do? Are you just calling some API and giving it the sheet as the input, and then writing the output of the call back to the sheet? So then these Single Button Apps are just API endpoin…
Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app
#123You 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 ex…
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.
Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app
#124Google 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
#125You 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 ex…
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.
Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app
#126Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app
#127With 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.
Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app
#128Just 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 t…
Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app
#129I can see that Google Sheet has higher availability but fewer builtin dashboards.
Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app
#130You 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 ex…
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.