I want to develop an application which, in fairly broad terms, will involve creating and sharing (read only) google documents. The document readers will be consumers rather than clients internal to the document creaters organisation.
I don't really know how to approach creating this application. I'm primarily a .NET dev so was thinking of creating a Windows Azure application which utilises googles APIs for managing the sharing but I don't like the way that the application would be so disjointed. i.e. create documents in google and then switch to the Azure app for the sharing. I guess if I created an application and which used Word documents there'd still be a disjoint between document creating and sharing but it still feels wrong.
I looked at using the Google App Engine but I don't know Java (I did a little at uni) or Python so didn't look for very long. I also didn't want to pay upfront for something that might take a long time to develop and may never get finished. It's not for my employer, it's just a side/home project.
I guess this is a fairly open question because I'm really asking for advice and information on developing an application which consumes google docs. If anyone has any suggestions on articles or sample applications doing a similar thing then that would be great.
Thanks Ben
All you really need to do is interact with the Google Docs APIs, as you've observed. You can upload docs in whatever format is most convenient to generate, including word docs or HTML, and Google Docs will convert them to its native format for you. You can set sharing settings as you wish, and upload docs to a user's account (with their prior permission), or to a role account, then share the doc with the target users.
Regarding App Engine, there's no charge to get started: billing is usage based, with a generous free quota, so you needn't pay anything to try it out. Learning a new language is never a bad thing, either, and Python is - IMO - a particularly nice one.