Does anyone use GoogleData?

Question

I was recently considering using GoogleData for a hobby project to store my service's old data, (say 24+hours old), while I keep the fresh data on my servers (hobby project==cheap home server).

However I haven't really heard of anyone using GoogleData, so I was wondering about what other's experiences have been.

Edit: My brief usage pattern would be to basically store (cached versions) of objects representing (historical) entities. And relatively immutable data like past events or these entities, global prototype data my objects (also relatively immutable), in order to reduce the load on my server.

As for active entities I'd be storing changes locally and then posting them to GooglData (after 24 hours).

Thanks

Answer 1

If you don't mind, would you share a few details on what kind of data will be stored and how.

It will help to answer your question if we all know what the nature of your application entails.

Answer 2

So, I guess nobody uses google data apparently.

It does seem nice to store data you can't afford to host yourself though. Thus I think I'll still give it a try.

Answer 3

I did use GoogleData to store data frokm one of my project called TaskList. I use google spreadsheet specifically. It's quite hard to start with, but from google's sample, you can pretty sure knows what to do next. I did that in C#. Here's the sample apps and sdk for google-gdata. My advice, don't bother to read the online documentation about gdata, it explain a lot on the underlying xml structure and method to access each level (private vs public) data. You need to have a google account to start with. The way the data is read and written is quite odd comparing to standard SQL or dataset. But as an overall, the API is well design and almost everything is taken care off. Do give it a try.

PS: No doubt it's a bit slow when accessing with all the xml overhead plus plenty of redundant tagging with gdata.

Answer 4

Since you didn't really get a satisfactory answer to this, I might suggest looking at Amazon SimpleDB. It's not free, but unless you're storing zillions of records you'll probably only spend pennies per month. Like Amazon's other web services, you only pay for what you use.

SimpleDB is more generic than the Google Data services, which may suit a wider range of applications.

Answer 5

Haven't had time to get to my computer and clean up the code for posting, but my current solution has been to use Yahoo Pipes to get my query results from Google Data as directly to the browser as JSON instead of XML through a server. And its all done with client side Javascript alone, so I can get and use the data without the need for a server. However I still haven't made a script to store data on Google Data. That's the next step.

Answer 6

There are some nice gdata-based apps listed here.

You can treat spreadsheets like basic databases, take a look at this python wrapper and its .net port.