I really didn’t want to set up a special server for the data and build a database and the connector PHP for retrieving the data via Ajax because that’s a lot of work. The great news is that Google provides a direct solution via Google docs.

To start, I simply created a new spreadsheet and entered the data. Next, using the share button, I selected publish as web page. Finally, to get the data in a format that I can easily consume using Javascript, I clicked the more publishing options link on the publish page to generate the URL to download a CSV version of the spreadsheet.

Within minutes, I had created a Javascript-accessible data store that it easy to update, shareable and hosted via Google. To access the data in the spreadsheet, I now use the URL provided by the sharing dialogs, http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rocYeX7smxw1E2FFdhwsiiQ&output=csv&gid=0.

Now with just a little bit of jQuery, I can easily access the data in the spreadsheet and use it however I like. For example:

<script type="text/javascript">
  jQuery(document).ready(function() {
    jQuery.post('proxy.php', 
                    {uri: 'http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rocYeX7smxw1E2FFdhwsiiQ&output=csv&gid=0'}, 
                    function(resp){
                      do_somthing_with(resp);
                    });
  });
</script>

Obviously, the do_somthing_with function above would be able to do anything with the result data. Also, notice that I’m using a content proxy (example only) to retrieve the data. For more details about that, read my post about building a simple content proxy in PHP. Below I have written a simple example that retrieves the data and displays it in the following container. The code for the example is identical to the above with the exception of displaying the results.

As you can see, using Google documents as a data store can be a valuable addition to your web site implementation. The advantages include easy, sharable access to updating the data, always-on access to the data, and multiple formats for retrieving the data. Several features supported by Google docs publishing such as filtering and querying data and retrieving JSON results have not be covered here.