I want to create an app that accesses the GMail API, but I’m finding that it isn’t as simple as I thought it might be.

I’m hoping somebody in the community here might have some experience working with one of these API’s and could not only recommend the right solution, but also show me to some tutorials or examples that could help me get up and running.

Here are some of the requirements of this app:

• Preferably in Rails or Javascript or even PHP. I am open to other technologies as well, but hope they’d be easy to implement.

• Connects to gmail via Oauth

• Can read who emails have been sent to and received from. Basically would like to perform some analytics on who emails are sent to, when and how frequently.

I’ve read that one reason why this isn’t easy, and why there isn’t an official javascript API provided by gmail, is that google is concerned it’s going to make their service less performant for their users.