It’s the language used for extending GSuite and is based on JavaScript. Unlike the JavaScript that runs in your browser, it runs on a Google Server in the cloud, but unlike other server-based JavaScript engines such as NodeJs, it is synchronous. This synchronicity makes it much easier for ‘citizen developers’ to get started with Apps Script than with NodeJs whose asynchronicity is one of its strengths, but its complication can also act as a blocker for those coming to the JavaScript language for the first time.

Maturity

Apps Script has been around for over 10 years (2019 – a decade in Apps Script), and has developed slowly, but surely over the years. At the time of writing, a brand new version of Apps Script, using the same JavaScript engine as Chrome and NodeJs, has been released (Google refer to it as V8 (as will I) – the name of the Chrome engine that powers it).

Services

The main point of Apps Script is to allow you to access GSuite services and documents, but you can do much include, including building your own complete web-facing APIS in Apps Script. Most of the services accessible via Apps Script are simplified versions of the underlying APIS that power GSuite – for example, for most use cases, you can access a spreadsheet via an Apps Script service, or you can use the (more complicated) Google Spreadsheet API to access that same spreadsheet just as you could from any other language.

This section contains many pages of reusable snippets and discussion on Apps Script and its services built up over the 10 years Apps Script has been available.

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