Is it a good idea to $.post to Google Spreadsheet?

Question

I'm trying to design a feature in my webpage that sends data somehow to a central repository to be accessed later. It would be great if I could post to a Google spreadsheet since my collaborators would be more familiar with that then a MySQL database.

I've never done this, but I imagine it will take the form of a $.post call to a PHP page.

Is this possible, or even a good idea?

Answer 1

If you are talking about using jQuery's $.post() to a domain that is not your own, you are out of luck .

However, you could post to your own PHP file which then interacts with the Google Spreadsheet API.

Answer 2

Is it a good idea or not ?

There is a fierce battle between the big players (amazon, google, salesforce,...) about cloud computing. The components (Like Google spreadsheet) get more and more robust every year.

You could use a Google spreadsheet as a "database" for your application.

If It is for a simple project, It Will certainly work. Google forms for instance uses Google spreadsheet as a backend.

If It is for a critical & more complicated project, only do It if you really Know what you are doing. It Will simplify some things (Like remote access with an excel Like interface) but make some other things harder (Like data backups, replication,...)

The loss of 150.000 gmail accounts 2 weeks ago show that these new models bring new solutions but do not remove all the difficulties)

Answer 3

You can use the Zend Frameworks and php. You are able to create worksheets, post to the spreadsheet and so forth.

http://code.google.com/apis/spreadsheets/data/1.0/developers_guide_php.html that should get you started.

Also IBM have also a particularly good resource as well

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-googledata1/?ca=drs-