Any thoughts re: accessing the GoogleAPI from .NET

[Steve Hueners]

Am really enjoying your content and the approach you are tracking re: jSon everywhere, (or would it be 'under everything'?). It both provocative and frustrating in that I haven't been able to get enough of my poor head around the big picture just yet. I'm coming from the MS stack generating and consuming data via the ASP.NET MVC framework and would like to 'bake in' some of your jSon principles. Not just for the view-and-controller interactions but working against various Google services (calendar, contacts, spreadsheets).

Any thoughts on the wiring and plumbing involved where an IIS-based app is going to be interacting with the various GData APIs? And in particular how the .NET creature named WebAPI can be part of the equation?

many thanks for all and looking forward to more.
--steve...

[Bruce Mcpherson]

Hi Steve 

thanks for your mail. 

I'm afraid I dropped out of caring too much about anything microsoft server based a long time ago. My impression is that they tend to watch what's becoming hot and then build it on top of an ever more complicated environment. If I ever do any server based stuff (rarely) my choice would be either python or node.js, and jquery/javascript for client stuff. jSon is the glue that holds all that together.

Having said that, I think that the .net webapi,  seems to be much more jSon friendly than anything ive seen from microsoft till now. I notice that all their examples of  client interactions are in javascript, and the webapi code understands json and allows for javascript like syntax when building objects. This means that there is a highly understandable relationship between the server and client view of your data. So, given that they have embraced jSon, you can pretty much consume all the google  APIS already. The key thing is to get away from asp.net style client pages.

One of the things ive been focusing on lately is delegation of tasks to google apps script - In other words keep the interaction short, and get Google Apps Script to do the processing. This gives a certain platform independence (aside of course from a heavy reliance on google), and keeps all the data in the cloud. If you take that to the next stage, Google App Engine gives you server based capability using java or python - but google apps script delegation is an easy introduction using languages you already know. 

I don't know much about MS Azure - presumably this allows you to do the same thing using .net ? If so i think its a good model. 

--steve...

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