Back to Basics: Template-Driven Documentation

Documentation is something that some see as a necessary evil; others look at it as a needless chore better left to someone else; others still see documentation as the indicator of a job well done. Documentation templates can help bring all of these different perspectives together and write quality software that's easier and less expensive to maintain and extend.

Using Google Apps Script to Automate Document Creation

Google Apps Script is a Javascript-like programming language that runs on Google's cloud; it provides tools and library calls that allow developers to interact with data from both public and private sources (upon authorization by the end user whose data is being manipulated).

Automatically generated Google Apps Script documentation

Did you know that it's possible to view automatically generated documentation from your Google Apps Script scripts?  

My team has been using JSDoc to document files, functions, variables, etc. as a programming best practice. As a side-effect, we could use auto-complete on functions from other libraries to (greatly) simplify development. However, we would often find ourselves scrolling through library source code to find comments on how to properly use functions, constants, etc..

With the oft-overlooked documentation generation functionality of Google Apps Script provided here, it's possible to quickly and easily create developer-friendly documentation.

A question on Google Sites

Over the weekend, somebody posted a question in a forum that I thought was interesting.

They said that they wanted to use Google Sites to host a web site, but their organization's systems administrator said that Google is quite experimental and they frequently ditch services (such as iGoogle and Google Buzz)..  the administrator recommended that alternative hosting solutions should be considered instead.

This person was curious to know if these statements were true or not and whether or not Google Sites was a long-term viable hosting solution.