In a previous post, I described a simple web form to query and visualize the solubility data being generated as part of the ONS Challenge. The previous approach required me to manually download the data and load it into a Postgres database. While trivial from a coding point of view, it’s a pain since I have to keep my local DB in sync with the Google Docs spreadsheet.

However, Google comes to the rescue with their Query API, which allows us to view the spreadsheet as a table which can be queried using an SQL like language. As a result, I can ditch the whole local database, and simply have an HTML page constructed using Javascript, which performs queries directly on the solubility spreadsheet.

This is very nice since I now no longer have to maintain a local DB and ensure that it’s in sync with Jean-Claudes results. Of course, there are some drawbacks to this method. First, the query page will assume that the data in the spreadsheet is clean. So if there are two entries called “Ethanol” and “ethanol”, they will be considered seperate solvents. Secondly, this approach cannot be used to include cheminformatics in the queries, since Google doesn’t support that functionality. Finally, it’s not going to be very good for large spreadsheets.

However, this is a very nice API, that allows one to elegantly integrate web applications with live data. I heart Google!