Going GAS

Chapter 14. Advanced Google Services

What Are Advanced Google Services?

Google now provides a vast array of APIs, accessible from many platforms and often with software development kits (SDKs) in a variety of languages to make them as easy to use as possible. Figure 14-1 gives a snapshot of the currently available APIs.

Figure 14-1. Google APIs

Advanced Services Versus Google APIs

There are usually two ways to access these APIs:

• Using the language-specific SDK

• Via a REST API (normally JSON, but there are also some with XML capabilities)

The Google services, such as the Spreadsheet app, are built into Apps Script to enable easy access to the associated API, which you can also access through a language-specific library or by directly querying a JSON API. In principle, these services are doing the job that the language-specific SDK does in other platforms: simplifying access to the relevant parts of the underlying API.

Advanced services are integrated with Apps Script but do not have the same level of seamless integration as the built-in services. However, they give access to more features of the API. For example, the Drive app Apps Script service implements only part of the Google Drive web API, omitting certain features such as file revisions and custom properties.

Advanced services are more easily consumed and authenticated to than their equivalent JSON API, but sometimes ...