You probably have used the Apps Script DriveApp service. There are examples of this scattered throughout the projects on this site. There is another way to manipulate your Google Drive – an SDK that exposes its APIs to external apps, but of course you can also use it from Apps Script since there is a JSON API. It offers a number of benefits over the capabilities of the regular DriveApp service (no quota for example), but it also exposes a lot more functionality than you can get to from the built in Apps Script equivalent.
This section is about apps built using the Drive JSON API. I first became interested in this because I wanted to find a way of automatically getting my apps script source code from the Apps Script IDE to GitHub. Technically I could do this (and a lot more) by using the Eclipse plugin for apps script, but I develop on a variety of devices so I need something that is cloud based, and in any case I mainly use a chromebook – and Eclipse cannot run on that without a lot of hacking (but mainly I just don’t like Eclipse)
So that led me down this path,