Big updates to Apps Script

By Saurabh Gupta, Product Manager, Google Apps Script

Cross-posted with the Google Apps Developer Blog

Today at Google I/O, we announced many enhancements to Google Apps Script to help you build richer applications and share your apps with users. Apps Script began  as a tool for helping users get more done with their Google spreadsheets. Over time, Apps Script has grown to handle much more. It's a platform to extend Google spreadsheets and Sites, and a convenient way to create web applications.

We launched script.google.com  as a destination for Apps Script developers. You can now create scripts from script.google.com  or from Google Drive. Plus, your projects are now stored in Google Drive, and you can share them just like a Google document or spreadsheet.

HtmlService  can help you create beautiful interfaces using Apps Script. HtmlService allows you to create web apps using HTML, client-side JavaScript, and CSS. You can also use jQuery to build web apps. HtmlService uses Google Caja  to ensure that the HTML content served by your web apps is safer for you and your users.

We also launched a better way to store your application's data, ScriptDb . Every script now has an embedded JSON database. You no longer have to rely on a spreadsheet to store the data. Using ScriptDb, you can store a larger volume of data and search easily. We designed ScriptDb to be easy to use. It doesn't need connection strings or special passwords, and you can directly store and search your JavaScript objects without the need to convert them to a different format. You can learn more about ScriptDb on the Google Apps Script Developers page.

There are also now more options for deploying your web app. Your apps can now, with authorization, run as the user behind the keyboard, not just the script owner. This brings a new level of versatility to web apps built with Apps Script.

Finally, we wanted to make it easy to distribute your apps. You can now publish your apps in the Chrome Web Store . Register and package your app directly from the Publish menu in Google Apps Script. Then customize your listing from the Chrome Web Store and publish your app to the world.

We added a lot of new functionality to Apps Script, so in addition to our developer reference documentation , we've also created a new user guide . If you need further help you can reach out to us on Stack Overflow . You can also make feature requests and report issues on the Apps Script page on Google Code.

Building with Google Apps Script has become a lot easier and more powerful. We can't wait to see what you build. Happy scripting!