Slashdot Mirror
Google Makes Apps Script Available To All
theodp writes "Formerly only available to Apps Users, Google has made Apps Script available to everyone (sample script), including you Google Docs low-lifers. Apps Script lets you automate actions across spreadsheets, sites, calendars, and other Google services. No spamming, kids!"
In my opinion, this is going to make google's spreadsheet application a viable alternative to some uses of excel. God knows Apps Script is easier to use than excel macros.
Don't get me wrong, there are some things that excel will always be used for, but google spreadsheets have so far been just useless enough without outside manipulation that most people have turned the option down.
...Yeah, because we all know how easy it is for sites to work together, right? What did you expect? Except for their own services, Google can't make other people implement a scripting language...
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
There are APIs to retrieve URLs and parse XML. So you should be able to pull content from other sites into Google docs. Output is probably more difficult.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Actually, I have tried to automate tasks using various scripting languages, but it is getting a lot harder to do as more and more sites using AJAX instead of plain old HTML. Even pulling down a web page is becoming hard, since many of the web sites I am required to work with use all manner of session cookies (naturally, there is Javascript involved in that too). If you know of some toolkit or program that can actually run the javascript in a webpage, and let me automate the tasks through that page, that would be awesome, but I have a feeling such an environment does not exist yet.
Palm trees and 8
I was thinking more along the lines of a system that would allow me to write code that interacted with the HTML and Javascript in web pages, so that I could just write my own bridges between websites and not have to wait around for the owners to cooperate. I guess that is asking a lot though.
Palm trees and 8
There are such toolkits. I'm not familiar with any of them, but search for 'Mechanize' to get you started (there are such named libraries for Perl, Ruby and Python...).
Jumping off from that search, the first obvious 'full featured' toolkit is this one:
http://watir.com/
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
wicked complicated greasemonkey scripts?
" including you Google Docs low-lifers."
Fuck you theodp.
Some would argue though that that version of Office is superior to the current one...
Any guess how many COM developers there were at COM/ActiveX's peak in the late 90s?
Any guess how many web/XML/AJAX developers there are?
So much for Microsoft 1992 scripting and interoperability.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
So find a web host and get working. You can do that with some _very_ simple PHP - I have. I have a site that pulls news posts off of a facebook group and reformats them and such. It's about 10 lines of code. I also have an even smaller script that just pulls a specific text block off another page. And one that reads from an RSS feed. It's really not that hard.
http://php.net/manual/en/function.fopen.php
There are actually several environments like that. You might want to check out HTMLUnit if you're a programmer. Alternatively the spammer community has done a great job of producing fully visual web-app automation environments, for instance, check out UBot Studio. If you can live with the presence of "solve captcha" and "generate random username" type commands and the community that comes with them, it might do what you want. Just be aware that a lot of websites treat screen scraping as abuse. Typically if they want to make data accessible there'll be an API, for instance Google offers REST APIs for many of its services.
Four days ago I would have disagreed. And then youtube did an update that broke my scraper and I haven't been able to figure out how yet. That said, I'd much rather that approach than, say, apple. Google won't have a problem with you doing weird shit with their services for the most part. As long as it's not scaming or triggers their automated warnings in some way. But you're shit out of luck if your unsupported method breaks. While apple just plain does everything they can to lock you out of doing anything in a way they didn't intend.
Everything will be taken away from you.
Now Googla jax off to Beta?
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
...but am I the only person here who senses an innate danger to entrusting one's data to a for-profit entity? I simply cannot fathom a scenario in which I would create a business-critical or personal spreadsheet to be stored on a Google server. Google's business is data mining, plain and simple. They certainly aren't offering all of these services out of the goodness of their corporate heart (if there is such a thing). Therefore, there must be some deeper motives at play. Yet, there are those who run around breathlessly extolling every move that Google makes.
Who are these people who would entrust every detail of their business and personal life to a for-profit company? I would have thought the /. crowd, of all groups, would be asking the difficult questions.
I find the relative silence concerning these issues both disconcerting and scary.
When you tie yourself to Microsoft Office you have physical possession of the software and they can't change it from under you. When you buy a copy of Microsoft Office and use it to script your business and finance operations, you can count on it continuing to work for 10 years, no question, as long as you can keep the hardware running, and then as long as you can run the OS in a VM.
With Google, they can change the software and scripting interfaces right under your nose and there's nothing you can do about. It's not even vendor lock-in, it's customer SOL, because unless you are willing and able to update your solution to use the new interface, that changes every 6 months or a year, knowing Google, you are SOL.
And the problem is largest for the customers who are most likely to want to take advantage of this: home and small businesses. They're the ones who are least able to take on 3 months of development on short notice to update their scripts to Google App Script x.x++. That will put a home or small business under.
Advance warning: do not allow another company to control your software upgrade cycle for critical business infrastructure, or they will control you.
What about Google writing App Script interpreter for Excel? Would that be helpful for migrating away from Excel to Apps?
...Google can't make other people implement a scripting language...
Oh, we can't, can't we?
...and UNIX has had shell-scripting for 30-odd years and Perl since 1987.
From a configuration and data manipulation perspective, as well as piping data between applications, there is nothing simpler than manipulating straightforward & boring text files.
It's because Microsoft went down the closed standards and proprietary formats path that there became a need to have a language like VB to work within the locked-down environment. So please don't credit Microsoft with anything innovative, VB just acts as a means to an end but was just "re-inventing the wheel" because of proprietary standards.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Well, if its XHTML from web pages, you can use the URLFetch service plus the XML service in App Script to do some of that, though App Script, with its run-manually approach, isn't really ideal for most situations where you'd want to build a bridge between different web services. For that, you want to build a an app that can poll & feed different sites autonomously -- which you can do with Google App Engine already.
Since the URL fetch service supports the HTTP methods POST, PUT, and DELETE as well as GET, output is not much more difficult than input.
App Script runs on the server side. Sure, the combination of URL Fetch and XML services let you do things generally similar to what you can do with AJAX in the browser, except on the server, not necessarily tied back to a single origin, and with an API integrating with Google Spreadsheets, Sites, Contacts, and Calendar, and Mail, among other services.