Posted by Jeremy S. Meredith, Google Drive Activity API Team
Today, we are announcing a new version of the Google Drive Activity API, used to access the record of user activity in Google Drive. This new API offers an expanded data model to provide meaningful representations of actions, actors, and targets of activity in Google Drive. It also offers new features for filtering the results of requests made to the API.
The version of the API released today replaces the existing Drive Activity API v1, so you should migrate your applications to the new version of the API soon. We will shut down the v1 API on December 31, 2019. At that time, any application that depends on the v1 API will no longer work.
A migration guide is available to help with this transition to the new Drive Activity API v2. You may also want to read the overview and guides for the new version, peruse the reference documentation, or jump right in and try it out in the APIs Explorer.
Enterprises are always looking for ways to operate more efficiently, and equipping developers with the right tools can make a difference. We launched Team Drives this year to bring the best of what users love about Drive to enterprise teams. We also updated the Google Drive API, so that developers can leverage Team Drives in the apps they build.
In this latest G Suite Dev Show video, we cover how you can leverage the functionality of Team Drives in your apps. The good news is you don't have to learn a completely new API—Team Drives features are built into the Drive API so you can build on what you already know. Check it out:
By the end of this video, you'll be familiar with four basic operations to help you build Team Drives functionality right into your apps:
Want to explore the code further? Check out the deep dive blog post. In all, the Drive API can help a variety of developers create solutions that work with both Google Drive and Team Drives. Whether you're an Independent Software Vendor (ISV), System Integrator (SI) or work in IT, there are many ways to use the Drive API to enhance productivity, help your company migrate to G Suite, or build tools to automate workflows.
Team Drives features are available in both Drive API v2 and v3, and more details can be found in the Drive API documentation. We look forward to seeing what you build with Team Drives!
Posted by Mike Procopio, Engineering Manager, Google Drive and Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, Google Apps
WhatsApp is one of the most popular mobile apps in the world. Over a billion users send and receive over 42 billion messages, photos, and videos every day. It's fast, easy to use, and reliable.
But what happens when people lose their phone or otherwise upgrade to a new one? All those messages and memories would be gone. So we worked with WhatsApp to give their users the ability to back up their data to Google Drive and restore it when they setup WhatsApp on a new phone. With messages and media safely stored in your Drive, there’s no more worry about losing any of those memories.
One of the biggest challenges for an integration of this scope is scaling. How do you back up data for a billion users? Many things were done to ensure the feature works as intended and is unnoticeable by users. Our approach? First, we relied on a proven infrastructure that can handle this kind of volume—Google Drive. Next, we optimized what to back up and when to do the backups—the key was to upload only incremental changes rather than transmit identical files.
On the server side (backend), we focused on optimizing byte storage as well as the number of network calls between WhatsApp and Google. As far as deployment goes, we rolled out slowly over several months to minimize the size and impact of deployment.
If you have ever used WhatsApp, you know how it gets out of your way, and lets you get started quickly: no account creation, no passwords to manage, and no user IDs to remember or exchange. This sets a high bar for any integration with WhatsApp: for it to feel like a natural part of WhatsApp, it has to be as seamless, fast, and reliable as WhatsApp itself.
By using the Google Drive API, we were able to achieve this: no need to type in any usernames or passwords, just a few taps in the app, and WhatsApp starts backing up. The best part is that all the tools used in the integration are available to all developers. With the Google Drive API, seamless and scalable integrations are as easy to use for the user as they are for developers.
To learn more about how we did it and get all the details, check out the complete talk we gave together with WhatsApp at Google I/O 2016.
Are you ready to integrate your web and mobile apps with Google Drive? Get started today by checking out our intro video as well as the video demoing the newest API, then dig in with the developer docs found at developers.google.com/drive. We're excited to see what you build next with the Drive API—and we're ready to scale with you!
Posted by Cheryl Simon Retzlaff, Software Engineer on the Realtime API team
Originally posted to the Google Apps Developer blog
Real-time collaboration is a powerful feature for getting work done inside Google docs. We extended that functionality with the Realtime API to enable you to create Google-docs style collaborative applications with minimal effort.
Integration of the API becomes even easier with a new in memory mode, which allows you to manipulate a Realtime document using the standard API without being connected to our servers. No user login or authorization is required. This is great for building applications where Google login is optional, writing tests for your app, or experimenting with the API before configuring auth.
The Realtime debug console lets you view, edit and debug a Realtime model. To launch the debugger, simply execute gapi.drive.realtime.debug(); in the JavaScript console in Chrome.
gapi.drive.realtime.debug();
Finally, we have refreshed the developer guides to make it easier for you to learn about the API as a new or advanced user. Check them out at https://developers.google.com/drive/realtime.
For details on these and other recent features, see the release note.
