I was starting a new project so I decided to go with the alpha google-api-java-client. I had no experience with the gdata library so I thought that if I invested time learning from scratch, it may as well be in the API that will receive the most support going forward.
The samples are pretty thin and I've spent quite a bit of time looking at the gdata API to see what helper functions I should build for my app. I think there should be some classes to encapsulate functionality like getting URLs for various actions (getting feeds, posting updates, etc) and dealing with Atom. For example, I shouldn't have to write (or grab from a sample and maintain) code for parsing the link element. The state of the documentation on the web is pretty confusing, especially as I often needed to use the gdata 2.0 Protocol Reference as well as the 3.0 Docs Protocol Guide, 3.0 Spreadsheet Reference Guide, and 3.0 Spreadsheet Developer's Guide. At the end of each day I had to keep track of *which* guides I was using so I started the next day using the same ones. For example, just for updating a row in a spreadsheet, I had to make sense of the following docS: - https://code.google.com/apis/documents/docs/3.0/developers_guide_protocol.html#UpdatingDocs - https://code.google.com/apis/spreadsheets/data/3.0/developers_guide.html#ListFeeds - https://code.google.com/apis/spreadsheets/data/3.0/reference.html#ListFeed However, responses to questions came quickly on the groups and that helped a great deal. I just wish I had time to put the lessons I learned and sample code somewhere online for others to reference. Also, for Google Labs projects like this, a link to the group should be more prominent that simply a link between Blog and Terms. I like where the API is headed; nice work. Sean
