Originally posted on Google for Education blog
Posted by Ed Kupershlak, Google Classroom Software Engineer
Last year, we launched the Classroom API to make it easier for administrators to manage classes, and for developers to integrate their applications with Classroom. Since that time, hundreds of applications have integrated with Classroom to help teachers gamify their classes, improve students’ writing skills, build interactive presentations and more.
Do more with coursework in the Classroom API
Today, we’re introducing new coursework endpoints that allow developers to access assignments, grades and workflow. Learning tools can focus on creating great content and, in turn, use Classroom to manage the workflow for assignments created with this content. Gradebooks and reporting systems can now also sync grades with Classroom, eliminating the need for teachers to manually transfer grades.
Several partners have been helping to test the new functionality, including:
Access course Drive folders, groups and materials
In addition to the coursework endpoints, we’ve added new functionality to our existing course and roster API endpoints. Developers can now access course Drive folders, groups and materials. Applications can use this new functionality to store files in the same Drive folder as the rest of the resources in a class, or use course groups to manage file sharing permissions.
In the coming months, we’ll be adding more coursework management capabilities. When we do, we’ll post updates to the developer forum and issue tracker. We look forward to working together to make it even easier for teachers and students to use the tools they love with Classroom. Developers, please review the documentation, the FAQ, and ask questions on Stack Overflow. Also, don’t forget to let us know what you’re building using the #withClassroom hashtag on Twitter or G+. And teachers, check out this list of applications that work well with Classroom today.
Posted by Mike Procopio, Engineering Manager, Google Drive and Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, Google Apps
WhatsApp is one of the most popular mobile apps in the world. Over a billion users send and receive over 42 billion messages, photos, and videos every day. It's fast, easy to use, and reliable.
But what happens when people lose their phone or otherwise upgrade to a new one? All those messages and memories would be gone. So we worked with WhatsApp to give their users the ability to back up their data to Google Drive and restore it when they setup WhatsApp on a new phone. With messages and media safely stored in your Drive, there’s no more worry about losing any of those memories.
One of the biggest challenges for an integration of this scope is scaling. How do you back up data for a billion users? Many things were done to ensure the feature works as intended and is unnoticeable by users. Our approach? First, we relied on a proven infrastructure that can handle this kind of volume—Google Drive. Next, we optimized what to back up and when to do the backups—the key was to upload only incremental changes rather than transmit identical files.
On the server side (backend), we focused on optimizing byte storage as well as the number of network calls between WhatsApp and Google. As far as deployment goes, we rolled out slowly over several months to minimize the size and impact of deployment.
If you have ever used WhatsApp, you know how it gets out of your way, and lets you get started quickly: no account creation, no passwords to manage, and no user IDs to remember or exchange. This sets a high bar for any integration with WhatsApp: for it to feel like a natural part of WhatsApp, it has to be as seamless, fast, and reliable as WhatsApp itself.
By using the Google Drive API, we were able to achieve this: no need to type in any usernames or passwords, just a few taps in the app, and WhatsApp starts backing up. The best part is that all the tools used in the integration are available to all developers. With the Google Drive API, seamless and scalable integrations are as easy to use for the user as they are for developers.
Are you ready to integrate your web and mobile apps with Google Drive? Get started today by checking out our intro video as well as the video demoing the newest API, then dig in with the developer docs found at developers.google.com/drive. We're excited to see what you build next with the Drive API—and we're ready to scale with you!
Posted by Tom Holman, Product Manager, Google Sheets
There was a time when office work used to be all about pushing physical paper. Computing and productivity tools have made things better, but workers still find themselves doing the same tasks over and over across the different apps they use: copying and pasting from a CRM app to a slide presentation, or manually exporting data from a project management app just to turn around and import it back into a spreadsheet. It’s the digital equivalent of pushing paper.
To make it easier to get the job done across multiple apps, without all the copy and paste, we’re announcing three new APIs and a new feature to help workers get to the data they need, when and where they need it.
Build seamless integrations with the new Sheets and Slides APIs
Our new APIs let developers connect their apps—and the data within them—more deeply with Google Sheets and Google Slides.
The new Sheets API gives developers programmatic access to powerful features in the Sheets web and mobile interfaces, including charts and pivot tables. For example, developers can use Sheets as part of a rich workflow that pushes data from their app into Sheets and allows users to collaborate on that data before the updated data is pulled back into the original app, removing altogether the need to copy and paste.
Teams at Anaplan, Asana, Sage, Salesforce, and SAP Anywhere are already building interesting integrations with the new Sheets API. Check out the video below to see an overview of what’s possible as well as several example integrations.
Partner integrations with the new Google Sheets API
The new Sheets API is available today. Find the developer documentation as well as a codelab to help you get started at developers.google.com/sheets.
Similar to the Sheets API, the new Slides API gives developers programmatic access to create and update presentations. For example, developers can use this API to push data and charts into Slides to create a polished report from source data in other application, ready to present.
Conga, ProsperWorks, SalesforceIQ and Trello are all building integrations with Slides using the new API. Several examples of what’s possible are in the video below.
Partner integrations with the new Google Slides API
The Slides API will be launching in the coming months, and these partner integrations will be available soon after. You can sign up for early access to the Slides API at developers.google.com/slides.
Keep your data in sync with the new Classroom API
For developers building tools and workflows for schools, the Classroom API has launched new coursework endpoints to help you build stronger integrations that keep your data in sync. Read the full announcement on the Google for Education blog, here.
Sync assignments & grades programmatically with the Google Classroom API
Say goodbye to stale data with linked charts
Finally, to make sure we can help keep all this data flowing seamlessly from app to app, users can now also embed linked charts from Sheets into Docs or Slides. The result? Once the underlying data in a spreadsheet changes, whether that change comes from an action taken in another app via the API or a collaborator, an updated chart in the corresponding presentation or document is just one click away.
Linked charts allow for easy updates in Docs & Slides
For more information, see how to add a chart to a document or to a presentation.
We can't wait to see what you build.
Posted by Vartika Agarwal, Technical Program Manager, Identity & Authentication, and Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, Google
As we indicated several years ago, we are moving away from the OAuth 1.0 protocol in order to focus our support on the current OAuth standard, OAuth 2.0, which increases security and reduces complexity for developers. OAuth 1.0 (3LO)1 was shut down on April 20, 2015. During this final phase, we will be shutting down OAuth 1.0 (2LO) on October 20, 2016. The easiest way to migrate to the new standard is to use OAuth 2.0 service accounts with domain-wide delegation.
If the migration for applications using these deprecated protocols is not completed before the deadline, those applications will experience an outage in their ability to connect with Google, possibly including the ability to sign-in, until the migration to a supported protocol occurs. To avoid any interruptions in service for your end-users, it is critical that you work to migrate your application(s) prior to the shutdown date.
With this step, we continue to move away from legacy authentication/authorization protocols, focusing our support on modern open standards that enhance the security of Google accounts and that are generally easier for developers to integrate with. If you have any technical questions about migrating your application, please post them to Stack Overflow under the tag google-oauth.
1 3LO stands for 3-legged OAuth: there's an end-user that provides consent. In contrast, 2-legged (2LO) doesn’t involve an end-user and corresponds to enterprise authorization scenarios such as enforcing organization-wide policy control access.
Posted by Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, Google Apps
Seasons greetings! In case you missed it last week, the Google Drive team announced the release of the next version of their API. Today, we dig deeper into details about the release with developers. In the latest edition of the Launchpad Online developer video series, you'll get everything you need to know about the new release (v3), as well as its relationship with the previous version (v2).
This jam-packed episode features an introduction to the new API, an interview with a Google Drive engineer about the API design and a code walkthrough of real source code you can use today (as with all my Launchpad Online episodes). This time, it's a command-line script that performs Google Drive file uploads and downloads, presented first in v2 followed by a how-to segment on migrating it step-by-step to v3. In addition, the uploading segment includes the option of converting to Google Apps formats while the download portion covers exporting to alternative formats such as PDF®.
To get started using the Drive API, check out the links to the official documentation above (v2 or v3) where you’ll also find quickstart samples in a variety of programming languages to the left. For a deeper dive into both Python code samples covered here, including v3 migration, start with the first of two related posts posted to my blog.
If you’re new to the Launchpad Online, we share technical content aimed at novice Google developers -current tools with a little bit of code to help you launch your next app. Please give us your feedback below and tell us what topics you would like to see in future episodes!
Posted by Matt Hessinger, Project Specialist, Google Apps Script
Welcome to our 100th blog post on Apps Script! It’s amazing how far we’ve come from our first post back in 2010. We started out highlighting some of the simple ways that you could develop with the Apps platform. Today, we’re sharing tips and best practices for developing more complex Apps Script solutions by pointing out some community contributions.
The Apps Script editor does not allow you to use your own source code management tool, making it a challenge to collaborate with other developers. Managing development, test, and production versions of a project becomes very tedious. What if you could have the best of both worlds — the powerful integration with Google’s platform that Apps Script offers, along with the development tooling and best practices that you use every day? Now, you can.
npm install -g node-google-apps-script
This project, “node-google-apps-script”, is a Node.js based command-line interface (CLI) that uses Google Drive API to update Apps Script project from the command line. You can view the node package on the NPM site, and also view the GitHub repo. Both links have usage instructions. This tool was created by Dan Thareja, with additional features added by Matt Condon.
Before using the tool, take a look at the Apps Script Importing and Exporting Projects page. There are a few things that you should be aware of as you plan out your development process. There are also a few best practices that you can employ to take full advantage of developing in this approach.
There is a sample project that demonstrates some of the practices described in this post: click here to view that code on GitHub. To get all of the Apps Script samples, including this import/export development example:
Your standalone Apps Script projects live in Google Drive. If you use a command-line interface (CLI) tool like the one linked above, you can work in your favorite editor, and commit and sync code to your chosen repository. You can add tasks in your task runner to push code up to one or more Apps Script projects, conditionally including or excluding code for different environments, checking coding style, linting, minifying, etc. You can more easily create and push UI-related files to a file host outside of Apps Script, which could be useful if those same files are used in other apps you are building.
In addition to the information on the Importing and Exporting Projects page, here are a few things to consider:
Over and above the editing experience, the biggest improvements you get by working outside the script editor is that you are no longer locked into working in just one Apps Script project. You can much more easily collaborate as a team, with individual developers having their own working Apps Script projects, while also having more controlled test, user acceptance and production versions, each with more process and security. Beyond just the consistency with other normal project practices, there are a few Apps Script specific ways you can leverage this multi-environment approach.
If you are going to use this approach, here are three best practices to consider:
The provided sample shows a simple example of how a base configuration class could allow a developer to inject their local values for their own debugging and testing. In this case, the developer also added the annotation @NotOnlyCurrentDoc, which tells Apps Script that they need the full scope for Drive API access. In this project, the “production” deployment has the annotation @OnlyCurrentDoc, which leads to the OAuth scope that is limited to the document associated with script running as Sheets, Docs, or Forms add-on. If you add a standard file pattern to the source project’s “ignore” file, these developer-specific files will never get into the actual codebase.
Benefits for your project — Production can have more limited OAuth scopes, while a developer can use broader access during development. Developers can also have their own personal configuration settings to support their individual development efforts.
While there is no current way to trigger tests in an automated way, you still may want to author unit tests that validate specific functions within your projects. You’ll also likely have specific configuration values for testing. Once again, none of these files should make it into a production deployment. You can even use the Apps Script Execution API to drive those tests from a test runner!
Benefits for your project — You can author test functions, and keep them separate from the production Apps Script file. This slims down your production Apps Script project, and keeps the correct OAuth scopes that are needed for production users.
If you are developing an add-on for Sheets or Docs, and you expect to have an “active” item on the SpreadsheetApp. However when you are developing or testing, you may be running your Apps Script without an “active” context. If you need to develop in this mode, you can wrap the call to get the current active item in a method that also can determine what mode you are running in. This would allow your development or test instance to inject the ID of an “active” document to use for testing, while delegating to the getActive* result when running in a real context.
Benefits for your project — You can integrate better unit testing methodologies into your projects, even if the end deployment state dependents on resources that aren’t typically available when debugging.
You now have the option to use your own development and source management tools. While you still do need to use the Apps Script editor in your application’s lifecycle — to publish as a web app or add-on, configure advanced services, etc. — taking this step will help you get the most out of the power of the Apps Script platform. Remember to check out Apps Script on the Google Developers site to get more information and samples for your Apps Script development.
If you happen to use python tools on the command line to facilitate your team’s build process, you can check out Joe Stump's python-gas-cli. You can view the package info here or the GitHub repo where you’ll also find usage instructions.
Here are some additional reference links related to this post:
Posted by Muzammil Esmail, Product Manager, Google for Work and Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, Google Apps
Over the years, we’ve been updating our APIs with new versions across Drive and Calendar, as well as those used for managing Google Apps for Work domains. These new services offer developers improvements over previous functionality and introduces new features that help Apps administrators better manage their domains.
To deliver even more granular control, today we are announcing the new Calendar Resource API as part of the Admin SDK’s Directory API that enables Google for Work customers to manage their physical resources, like conference rooms, printers, nap pods, tennis courts, walkstations, etc. These physical resources can be added to meetings by end users as needed. The API released today replaces the GDATA Calendar Resource API, so we encourage developers to begin moving their applications and tools to the new API. Please note that we will begin deprecation in January 2016 and sunset the existing API in January 2017. Stay tuned for a formal deprecation announcement with details.
Posted by Rishi Dhand, Product Manager, Google Apps Admin SDK and Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, Google Apps
In a Google Apps domain, Admin role management (i.e. create, assign, and update admin roles) is a critical function for super admins that helps them distribute admin responsibilities in a more secure manner. Until now, this functionality was only available via the Admin console UI.
Today’s launch of the Roles API (one of the Admin SDK Directory APIs) enables developers to build admin tools that can perform role management programmatically.
This new API will be useful to admins who have either built internal admin tools using the Admin SDK, or developers of third-party admin tools. Both can now use the Roles API to provide selective access to Delegated Admins (DAs) to specific admin capabilities within third-party applications.
Here are some examples of use cases where the Roles API can be leveraged:
