WaveCamp soup

[wavecamp] Upcoming Wave Developer Events

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 15:19:03 GMT

Now that the new Wave Robots API is launched, we're excited to spread the word about Wave to developers in all corners of the world. Please join us in one of the upcoming events:

Chicago GTUG Google Wave & Android Workshop

March 13, 9-5pm
Chicago, Illinois

Google Hackathon @ SXSW Interactive

March 14, 12pm
Austin, Texas

SF Wave Meetup

March 16, 6:30pm
San Francisco, CA

Novell Brainshare

March 23 and March 25
Salt Lake City, Utah

DevFest Mexico

April 13, All day
Mexico City, Mexico

EJA Melbourne Forum

April 21, 5pm
Melbourne, Australia

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] Introducing the Google Wave Extensions Gallery

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:39:20 GMT

We've just rolled out an initial version of our extensions gallery: simply look for "Extensions" in the navigation panel of Google Wave. The gallery is intended to make it easier for users to discover the fun and useful extensions you all are building with the Google Wave APIs.

The gallery is simply a set of waves containing extension installers (the puzzle pieces). The first wave, "Read me first" contains an introduction to extensions and how to use them. In many cases, those particular waves won't maintain their read/unread status in Google Wave preview; we're working on this. Beyond that, we have some design improvements in the works, but we wanted to get this out there to get feedback and help users find your extensions.

As a tip, you can also use the waves in the gallery to share a direct link to your extension's installer with other Google Wave users -- simply open the installer and copy-and-paste the URL (note: the panel arrangement and search query are included in the URL, but can easily be edited out).

While you're building your extensions, if you'd like them to be included in the gallery, please be sure to submit them for review. You may also want to check out Mashable's Google Wave API Challenge.

We look forward to seeing what you come up with -- especially with the new Google Wave robots API (v2).

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager, Google Wave

[wavecamp] My Extension Wish: Recipeasy

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:37:03 GMT

Hi! I'm Anna Rose Kerr, a Kiwi and Google Wave user living in Sydney. Coming from a background in creative advertising, I see a lot of potential for Wave to make everyday tasks more efficient and enjoyable. Now, I want to share one of my ideas for how developers can make my own life easier.

Before I moved in with my boyfriend, I had no idea that making dinner could be such a complex problem. My normal approach of "eat whatever I feel like when I get hungry" does not compute with him, and thus we spend hours each day discussing what is for dinner that night. We have to factor in what's in the fridge that needs to be consumed, seasonal product, and which animal he currently feels sympathetic towards and won't eat. It often gets too complicated and we end up eating take-aways.

An ideal solution would be a cookbook extension that could do the math and come up with a recipe given all these variables, and I call that solution "Recipeasy." This extension would sit on a wave between you and your dinner guests, suggesting recipes using the ingredients you have and the foods you all like to eat.

First, the extension could insert a gadget that let users add lists of food items which they "have", "would like" or "would not like". Other users can click on these items to confirm they are a good choice or delete them from a list. The most popular ingredients have the greatest influence on the generated recipe suggestions. The extension could also include a robot that would scan the conversation for food items, and pull those out and insert them into the gadget. It would work off phrases such as "I can bring some..." or "yuck I don't like..." to place the various ingredients discussed into the right lists.

Recipeasy would automatically produce 3-5 of the top recipes based on your selections. Clicking on a recipe name within the gadget would open the recipe's own Wave. Here, you might find suggestions and tips from other Wavers who have already tried the recipe and you can add your own review. These "Recipeasy" waves form your own virtual cookbook, which would be easily accessible by searching "with:recipeasy".

There are some obvious businesses to partner with when making this extension — like supermarket chains which could offer to deliver the extra food needed to complete a recipe. Recipe sites or chefs could add to the Recipeasy database from their own repertoire and pull the Waver's comments back onto their site.

An extension like Recipeasy would make cooking so much easier by using food you already have (or getting what you don't have delivered) and taking the effort out of agreeing on a meal. While cooking may not appeal to you directly, just think — this could be the way you get your mother using Google Wave!

Posted by Anna Rose Kerr, Google Wave User

[wavecamp] Introducing Robots API v2: The Rise of Active Robots

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:01:23 GMT

Robots are an important part of the Google Wave API, and they've just become a lot more powerful. We've recently released version 2.0 of the robots API, which includes a bunch of new features:

Active API: In v2, robots can now push information into waves (without having to wait to respond to a user action). This replaces the need for our deprecated cron API, as now you can update a wave when the weather changes or the stock price falls below some threshold. You can learn more in the Active API docs.
Context: Robots can now more precisely specify how much information they want to get back from a particular event. If only the contents of the affected blip needs updating and you want to reduce your robot's bandwidth, then you can specify the new 'SELF' context. On the flip side, if you do need all the information in the wavelet, you can specify the new 'ALL' context. You can learn more in the Context docs.
Filtering: In a similar way, with this new API, the robot can specify what events it needs to respond to, conserving valuable bandwidth -- and ignore all those that don't apply. You can learn more in the Filtering Events docs.
Error reporting: Robots are now able to register to receive errors about failed operations, such as insertion on non-existent ranges. You can learn more in the Error Reporting docs.
Proxying-For: Robots can now convey to Google Wave that their actions are actually on behalf of a different user, via the proxyingFor field. For robots like the Buggy sample, which connects with the Google Code issue tracker, this means that the wave can be updated with attribution to users on non-wave systems. You can learn more in the Proxying-For docs.

To get started with the new API, please check out the basics and download the new client libraries: Java | Python. As part of this new API release, we're also standardizing around a new robot wire protocol. These client libraries are built around this wire protocol, and this protocol specification also opens the door for you to write your own client libraries in your preferred language.

As you're getting started, visit the samples gallery to see what others have built, which includes examples of the new robot API in action: Stocky, Submitty, and Twitter-Searchy.

If you create an amazing extension and think it's ready to share with users, please submit your extension (naturally, we're using a robot to help, but more on that later).

Additionally, as part of this release, we're experimenting with holding discussions about the new API in Google Wave itself. We've actually created a robot to help facilitate these conversations, and you can read more about how to get started with Wave API discussions in the Wave API Forum Botty page. Please continue to file bugs in google-wave-resources.

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager, Google Wave

[wavecamp] My Extension Wish: Workflow in Wave

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 23:32:32 GMT

Greetings! I'm Amanda and I work on Developer Relations for Google Wave. Continuing on our series of dream Google Wave extensions, I want to tell you one of my own wish...a Wave-ified workflow system.

From Expense Reports to major Press Releases, there are a lot of documents a typical company produces that require a workflow to ask for reviews and collect the necessary approvals/signatures. Google Wave is already very useful as a mean for collaboration to produce such documents and can potentially be extended to process workflows as well.

To describe how this can work, let's say I need to write a press release announcing the release of a new ground-breaking product to the world. Before releasing it, I first want the product manager to sign off on it, then a lawyer, then a PR person, and finally someone from upper management. These approvals can be done using a gadget inserted at the top of the wave while the rest of the wave contains the press release itself and reviewer comments. The gadget contains a graphical representation of the workflow and shows simple colored buttons representing the state so far. This can potentially be done by parsing YAWL (Yet Another Workflow Language) into Javascript.

For example, once the press release has been approved by PM and Legal, the current gadget state is "Pending PR Approval", the PM and Legal buttons are greyed out, and the PR button is highlighted. Since Joe is the designated PR person to approve, there is an extra "Approval" button only visible to him. When an action happens, like Joe pressing that button, the state changes accordingly and proceeds to the next step in the workflow.

The extension could also let the user select different document types in the gadget and depending on the type, it can automatically check if a document already meets the basic criteria (e.g a tweet can only contains 140 characters) before it can be approved. Furthermore, once all approvals have been received, a robot can automatically delete the comment blips to prepare the document for final publication. The possibilities are endless of course, and different companies would have different workflows to match their needs. The most flexible workflow extension should allow the creation of custom workflow templates.

Google Wave may not be ready to replace heavy workflow systems such as those to process insurance claim or what not, but for many forms of official communication documents, it is the perfect tool to collaborate, (and hopefully soon) review, and approve.

Feel free to discuss ideas for workflow extensions in the API forum or in a public wave. We're looking forward to hearing your ideas!

Posted by Amanda Surya, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] My Extension Wish: Wave Timer

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:28:32 GMT

Hi I'm Anna-Christina, I work on product marketing for Google Wave. Aside from "drinkin' coffee", I run a weekly team meeting using waves: I start the wave ahead of time, people add their questions and agenda items, then during the meeting I project the wave on the screen for people in the room, and others just follow along. Generally, it runs pretty smoothly, except for one thing: I can't tell how long we talk about each topic!

I would love a collaborative timer, clock, or stopwatch that I could put at the top of a wave when the meeting starts. As we begin each topic, we can set the timer for a given amount of time, and we could easily see when we are taking too much time (or approaching that stage). Ideally, we could embed the gadget twice, and use one of them to keep track of the overall meeting length. I run a tight ship! :)

While my example use case is for work, I think a stopwatch extension could work for school applications (like timed practice tests), or any sort of timed activity in a wave, like office hours or a timed creative brainstorm like: How many haikus can we create in 5 minutes? Ready.....go!

A more sophisticated stopwatch extension could also include a robot to update the wave when time was nearing to an end, so that the wave popped up in participant's inboxes. Then, it could be used for things like warning people when a meeting is about to start, or when a big event is about to happen (New Years!).

Feel free to discuss ideas for the stopwatch extension in the forum or in a public wave, and make sure to submit it to the extensions gallery when you're ready to share it with the world (and most importantly, *me*).

Happy waving!

Posted by Anna-Christina Douglas, Product Marketing, Google Wave

[processwave] Open source library syncro brings realtime collaboration to Google Wave Gadgets

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:26:01 GMT

We have written syncro, an open source JavaScript library for Google Wave gadgets that makes it really simple to bring complex collaboration to gadgets. Syncro provides an interface to a distributed command stack stored in the gadget state. The library ensures an unambiguous chronological order of all commands pushed to this stack.

To see a little demo gadget, get the code or read more, visit our blog.

http://www.processwave.org/2010/02/syncro-real-collaboration-in-google.html

[Reposted from processwave]

[wavecamp] Google Wave at I/O

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 04:15:03 GMT

As you may remember, Google Wave was first unveiled to the world at last year's Google I/O, in the 80-minute (infamous?) keynote. In the handful of sessions that we squeezed in on that second day, we explained the basics of the API, the core operational transformation (OT) algorithm, how we take advantage of GWT to build the client, and a bit about the federation protocol. This year, we are focusing on how you can build upon those basics to take Wave integration to the next level. We'll teach you how to build amazing extensions, how to get your own wave server running, and how to start using Wave inside your business. Check out the sessions below, and make sure you can join us for them by registering for I/O!

Open source Google Wave: Building your own wave provider
Dan Peterson, Jochen Bekmann

Google Wave API design principles + anatomy of a great extension
Pamela Fox, Douwe Osinga

Making smart & scalable Wave robots
Douwe Osinga, David Byttow

Google Wave and the enterprise environment
Greg D'alesandre

We're looking forward to chatting with you all, seeing what you've been working on, and discussing what awesome ideas are brewing in your heads.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] My Extension Wish: A Joint Jukebox

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 06:41:19 GMT

In the API corner of the Google Wave cubicles, we're often digressing into energetic discussions about an awesome extension that we want to see, and scheming about how we can encourage developers to implement these fantasy extensions. Since none of us are very good at inserting subliminal messages into forum posts, we figured we'd share our ideas on this blog instead, in a series of posts from various members of the Google Wave team.

To start off the series, I want to sell you on the idea of the "Joint Jukebox". First, some background. Sometimes I find myself in situations where friends put me in charge of playing music during a party, and I am constantly reminded by said people that I have one of the "worst" tastes in music ever.

So, I have experimented with various ways of giving people a way to influence the stream of music. When I was a lab assistant in college, I wrote an app that used Google Spreadsheets to power a Youtube player that I projected on the screen. My classmates could add Youtube video IDs to the spreadsheet, and change the number in the "rank" column to get the video to play sooner. That worked alright, but the voting mechanism (the "rank" column) was too easy to hack, and not that fun to use. I always envisioned writing a digg-like interface for it, but since I never got the chance, I'm putting you up to the challenge of doing it... but Wave-ified!

The Joint Jukebox would let users search for songs (using any one of the various music APIs on the web), and then submit play requests (or skip requests for the haters) on each submitted song. A highly intelligent algorithm would be constantly analyzing the current rankings and play history of all the songs, and use that information to select the next song to play. A group could use this as their DJ for a party or joint working space, just by hooking up a computer displaying the Wave to their audio system. Or, a couple in a long-distance relationship could use it across oceans, to feel like they're aurally connected. The Jukebox could also support playing music videos, or even playing karaoke versions of songs with lyrics displayed. No more listening to lame slow songs by the one depressed dude at Karaoke — you'll just vote him down!

The diagram below — made using a cool UI mockup app called Mockingbird (which would also make a great extension to Google Wave) — shows what the main screen and stats dialog could look like for the gadget. The jukebox shows the currently playing songs, the songs slated to play next, and then tabs to browse other songs users can rate. Users can suggest new songs, of course, when they want to listen to the latest from their favorite pop star or musical TV drama. :)

So, that's my wish — making music listening into a collaborative experience. If you want to help fulfill my wish — or if you're inspired to take it in a different direction — pop by the forum and share your ideas. Thanks, in advance!

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] German Wave Camp - Stand der Dinge: wavecamp.soup.io/...

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:55:26 GMT

German Wave Camp - Stand der Dinge: wavecamp.soup.io/...

[oneaim] German Wave Camp - Stand der Dinge

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:50:47 GMT

Wie ist der Stand rund um das German Wave Camp in Kürze?

- das Camp soll zwei mal im Jahr stattfinden

- das erste soll bis Juni 2010 in Berlin statt finden

- das zweite im Herbst 2010 in München

- wir werden mit allen Google Technology User Groups in Deutschland zusammenarbeiten

- Warum ging es Ende 2009 nicht? Weil es noch zu wenig Projekte gab und die grundlegende Waveentwicklung mehr Zeit in Anspruch nahm als gedacht. Beides nicht so gut für eine große öffentliche Veranstaltung.

- Ausserdem ist es wichtig Google in die Planung gut einzubinden. Wir stehen in Kontakt zu Google. Herausforderung: Alle Google Wave Entwickler sind in Australien. Wir müssen also Entwickler aus Australien zu den Veranstaltungen holen. Google macht sein Jahresplan für 2010 gerade fertig. Im Februar soll es konkret werden. Eine große Konferenz ohne die Wissensträger macht nur wenig Sinn.

Bei weiteren Fragen schreibt einfach.

Wir melden uns wieder sobald es mit Google konkret wird. Bitte schreibt auch, wenn ihr Technologieunternehmen kennt, die an Wave interessiert sind und entweder

- die Wave Entwicklung pushen wollen (Stichwort Wave Server)

- oder für ein Sponsoring in Frage kommen würden (einige Sponsoren haben wir schon)

Alles Liebe und ein erfolgreiches Jahr 2010 wünscht
das Orga Team!

Email: ingmar.redel <at> echologic.org

Webseite: http://wavecamp.mixxt.org

[oneaim] DokuWiki und Google Wave

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:43:42 GMT

Du möchtest DokuWiki Inhalte mit einer Wave synchronisieren? Dann probiere mal die verlinkte Entwicklung aus und gib uns Feedback ob es klappt!

team
wavecamp.mixxt.org

http://github.com/evilhackerdude/dokuwave

[wavecamp] 15 days, 8 countries and zillions of developers

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 06:10:27 GMT

Leaving October spring weather in Sydney for a trip around Europe was not easy. But any doubts about the wiseness of our trip disappeared as we walked into the first GTUG event in London where 300+ developers showed up to learn more about the Google Wave APIs. We met two of the most prolific wave developers there (you might know them from extensions such as Rssybot and Votely) as well as meeting David Crane who asked for 1000 accounts for Global Youth Panel to debate climate change. As we flew from country to country, we continued to meet more developers whose enthusiasm for Wave gave us the energy to overcome our jetlag and see the sights of Europe.

Check out the lives waves, videos, and slides for the various events below:

London, England
Oct. 26: GTUG London: Live waves, Blog post

Vienna, Austria
Oct 27: TechEd SAP

Amsterdam, Netherlands
Oct. 28: Dutch GTUG: Video
Oct. 30: eComm Europe 2009: 30+ live waves, Many blog posts

Zurich, Switzerland
Nov. 2: Google Wave Tech Talk: Live wave

Prague, Czech Republic
Nov. 6: Google Developer Day: Prague: Wave APIs talk (and slides), Wave client talk

Moscow, Russia
Nov. 10: Google Developer Day: Moscow: Wave APIs talk (in Vadim's native Russian!), Wave client talk, Live waves

Munich, Germany
Nov. 11: GTUG Munich: Live wave, Video

We look forward to hearing about future Wave events put on by European developers, like the recently held 2-day Wave Hackathon in Munich.
See you next year, Europe!

Posted by Steph Hannon, Google Wave Product Manager

[wavecamp] 2 days of ideas, hacks, and pufferfish in Tokyo

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 05:49:28 GMT

I am never one to turn down a trip to Japan. Firstly, because a friend of mine has become entirely dependent on a constantly flowing supply of authentic Pocky (a surprisingly addictive chocolate-covered pretzel snack that I once ate for breakfast every day for 2 weeks). Secondly, because the Japanese developer community has a creativity and energy that both infects and inspires me.

I stopped by Japan on my way back to Australia, for 2 days of Google Wave developer events. I arrived on the first night in a strangely alert jet-lagged state to find myself amidst what they called an "Idea-a-thon". This was basically a pre-party for the hackathon the next day, where groups of developers would brainstorm ideas and then present them. I didn't understand much of what they said, but luckily, they sketched out logos and diagrams on sheets of paper. I saw a Wave/Twitter logo, where the "w" was Wave's "w", and a diagram involving a flow between Eclipse and SVN... enough info to get me excited.

After the idea-a-thon, we all headed upstairs to a real party (beer = party, right?), where a mix of developers and journalists gathered to hear the latest about Google Wave. Ando Yasushi started off the night with an introduction of the APIs, and a demo of his own Animal Chess ("Dobutsu Shogi") gadget (which is now near and dear to my heart, as I was actually able to win the game.. that never happens). I then showed off a series of my favorite demos - using Napkin Gadget to collaboratively draw a demon love-child, AJAX Animator to show my flight across the Pacific, and AmazonBot to aid my purchase of an inflatable castle and a pony (childhood dreams never die). Googler Hiroshi Ichikawa demo'd his own extensions - an HTML5 drawing gadget and a Kanjy robot, and then blazed through a wave of Japanese-created games, like Donpachi, Reversi, Tetris, Tictactoe, and yet another Shogi implementaton. After a few more talks and rounds of beer, we headed home to rest up for a full day of hacking the next day (well, that would have been the plan, if I hadn't sold my soul to the jet lag devil).

Bright and early, at 10am, I kicked off the hackathon with several debugging tips, and presented "Making Wave-y Extensions", a talk about how to make gadgets and robots that take full advantage of the collaborative & real-time experience of Google Wave. For the next 8 hours, the developers dilligently worked together to make their idea come to life, each group huddled around a 30inch monitor.

Finally, my favorite part: demos! The first team showed "Weclipse", a plugin for Eclipse that embedded the Google Wave client as a tab in the IDE, with the hope of making coding more social. In that embedded wave, they also showed a robot that received messages from an Android and posted them as blips. Then, Maripo Goda, author of the Brainstorming gadget and tDiary plug-in, showed her team's project: an end-to-end message translation system. One of her team members is on the Debian JP project, and wanted an extension to expedite translations for the operating system. The extension starts with a gadget that loads in translation files, lets the participants set the translations, and then it commits them to an SVN repository. There have been multiple translation helper extensions created by international developers over the last few months, but this is the first I've seen that tackles the software message translation problem.

Atsushi Nakamura, who also attended the Tokyo Chrome Extensions hackathon the week before, then demo'd his Chrome+Google Wave hack, a bookmarklet which pops down an embedded Wave - "ChroMemo." I can see that being really useful for storing little notes, a to-do list, or a schedule. Ando Yasushi demoed his own prototype of operational transforms - in JavaScript. Well, that's certainly one way of learning how Wave works. :)

My trip ended with a dinner of traditional "Fugu" - pufferfish, cooked (and not cooked) in every way possible: sashimi, grilled, boiled, and my favorite: deep fried. I learnt over dinner that a dish of pufferfish can cause instantaneous death, if the internal organs aren't plucked out properly. Well, luckily, my new Japanese friends took me to a properly licensed restaurant, and I'm alive now to tell you about the trip and enjoy my souvenirs - 10 flavors of Pocky and 3 flavors of Mochi.

The Japanese developers are going full speed ahead into Wave development, with another two events planned in the next month: Kyoto GTUG Wave Hackathon, and a Tokyo "Demo Tournament". I'm too bloated on my pocky to make it out there for those events, but I expect to hear about more innovative ideas and exciting extensions coming from my new developer friends in Japan. Until next time, Tokyo!

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] What Does Clam Chowder & the Google Wave API Have in Common? Boston!

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:34:57 GMT

I've always been a fan of Boston, Massachusetts. If I could dig it up and transport it to an eternally warm weather location, it would rank in my top 3 of best cities in the world. It's filled with history (really gruesome stuff like the Salem Witch trials) and creative intellect (the MIT Media Lab is like a playground for nerds), and conveniently enough, 2 members of my immediate family (3, counting my kitty). So, I like to visit it whenever I'm in the states, and since there is now a Massachusetts GTUG, I took the opportunity to co-organize a Google Wave APIs hackathon with them (using a wave to plan it, of course).

On the day of the event, about 60 developers showed up (including my sister, a Drupal developer), and they filled the office cafe up nicely with their laptops and power cords. I kicked it off with a talk called "Understanding & Extending Wave", then Brian Kennish led them through a coding walkthrough of the "click me" gadget and Embeddy robot. We used ustream.tv to stream the the talks and also recorded them, so you can watch them now on Youtube. Then we grabbed lunch and got to coding. There was a never-ending stream of good questions throughout the day, which I captured in the comments wave and later used to fuel our new Google Wave APIs FAQ. There was also a table of people hacking specifically on FedOne, creating agents and getting their own servers running. After everyone had gotten their hands dirty in code for a few hours, I showed extension installers and presented "Making Wave-y Extensions".

After another few hours of hacking, we started demos and wrote them up in this live wave. We were once again using ustream.tv to stream demos, and after tweeting about it, we suddenly had developers from all over the world commenting on the Wave and watching our demos. They hailed from Argentina, Ukraine, and Japan, and used the Yes/No/Maybe gadgets to demand that we wave hello to them on our webcam (and then uploaded a recording of our real lifewave as an attachment!). The local developers showed off nifty demos, like the VoiceChat-9 gadget, Ruby FedOne Agent API, and the Mastermind game gadget. Interning Googler Jonathan Goldberg also showed off beginnings of integration with the just-released Google Fusion Tables. You can watch those demos on Youtube.

It was great to meet Bostonian developers, and it gave me a new reason to love Boston. Hopefully by the time I make my next annual visit, I'll have taught my kitty cat to use Wave. :)

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] Google Wave API Articles: Extensions Debugging & Robot-to-Gadget Communication

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:30:38 GMT

We've recently added an articles section to the Google Wave APIs documentation, with three articles to make Google Wave API development easier.

Debugging Robots
Learn how to use the App Engine logs for easier debugging, verify your robot is set up correctly, and even test your robot locally (without deploying). This article can speed up your development process by making it faster and easier to catch bugs.

Debugging Gadgets
Get tips for testing new code, simulating multiple users, logging debug messages, and logging state deltas. Developing multi-user real-time gadgets is hard when you're just one developer, and this article should make it easier for you.

Robot-to-Gadget Communication
Delve into the innards of "Embeddy", the robot that generates embed code for a wave. This article describes how robots can insert gadgets on a wave, and then set the state of them. Some of the most useful extensions out there involve careful interaction of robots and gadgets, and this can get you started.

Enjoy the articles - and please tell us in the forum if you have improvements or your own articles to share.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] You got questions? We've got answers!

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 02:18:39 GMT

Last Saturday, at the Mass GTUG Wave Hackathon, I spent six hours hopping from table to table, answering questions about the best way to do X, the quickest way to do Y, and the future way to do Z. I soon realized that these questions were likely reflective of the questions that go through the heads of developers getting started with the Google Wave APIs, and I started taking notes (in Google Wave, of course). With the help of my colleagues, we've turned those notes into the beginnings of an FAQ for Wave developers. There are 4 sections in the FAQ, covering questions on sandbox/preview accounts, client libraries, and general development tips, helping you answer questions like "How do you retrieve a submitted blip?" and "How can you view the XML representation of a Wave?".

The coolest part of the FAQ is that it's actually generated from a series of waves on WaveSandbox.com, and a robot takes care of exporting the waves into the HTML page. This means that our team can use Wave for super-easy collaboration on the FAQs, but we can represent the information in a format that is viewable by everyone and fits in with the rest of the documentation. The FAQ-generator robot is based on the Exporty sample, so take a look at that if you want to implement a similar system to meet your own needs.

Please read through the FAQ when you have the chance; you might learn something new, or hey, you might have an answer that's better than ours. Stop by the Google Wave API forum to let us know what we can improve or add.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] Upcoming US Events with Google Wave Presentations

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 23:31:00 GMT

Similiar to the Google Wave European tour, we're stopping by several developer events in the states:

LISA 2009

Nov. 1-6, 2009, in Baltimore MD
Nov. 4 (today!) - "Google Wave Federation Protocol" with Joe Gregorio

SF Java User Group

Nov. 10, 2009, in San Francisco, CA
"Google Wave APIs: Now & Beyond" with Marcel Prasetya

Dreamforce

Nov. 17-20, 2009, in San Francisco, CA
Nov. 19 - "Ready to Ride the Google Wave?" with Dan Peterson

Massachusetts GTUG Wave Hackathon

Nov. 21, 2009, in Boston, MA

All of these events are still open for registration - so grab a seat while you still can. See you there!

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] WaveSandbox.com: Federate This

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:25:52 GMT

When we first unveiled Google Wave a few months ago, one of the fundamental concepts we discussed was the vision for wave as an open communications protocol. We are happy to announce that the developer instance of Google Wave is now available for experimental interoperability testing with other wave providers. This means that if you are interested in building a service that uses the Google Wave Federation Protocol, you can begin prototyping with a tool like FedOne against WaveSandbox.com.

Since Google Wave Federation Day, there have been a number of developments:

The Google Wave Conversation Model Spec (draft) was published to provide more clarity to implementors of the spec
The FedOne client was updated to the new model spec and now displays character by character updates
Echoey the agent was built to help you experiment with developing your own wave provider

If you'd like to dive in and get started, please check out the introductory docs. You can learn more by reading the more detailed status note on the wave protocol forum. Please keep in mind that things are early, and there will still be many changes, so your feedback is important. You can also contribute to the development of the growing open source reference implementation -- check out this guide to submit open source code.

Given the goal to build out a distributed network of providers, we're glad to be taking this step today and opening up the federation port for development purposes. We look forward to working with you to continue iterating on the protocol, developing an open source production quality reference implementation, and, of course, federating wave.google.com with many wave providers in the future.

Posted by the Google Wave Federation Team

[wavecamp] Happy Hallo-Wave-een!

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 04:35:57 GMT

I moved down to Australia a year ago, and just a few weeks ago, decided to stay here indefinitely because it's an awesome country. It has beaches, forests, cities, shark-eating-shark, kangaroos, and drop bears. What more could you want? Well, there is one thing: Halloween. I am a huge fan of any holiday that revolves around dressing up in ridiculous outfits and being rewarded with candy for it. Heck, I have two permanent (and really nasty looking) scars from trick-or-treating incidents, and I still love the holiday. (Tip: If your witch cape is held on by a shoestring, make sure you don't get the end of the cape caught under the wheels of a car when it revs up.) So, I've decided to show the Google Wave team what halloween is all about, first by dressing up like a faceless robot avatar (in honor of the recently resolved issue 335), and second by collaborating with Austin, another displaced American, to create a trick-or-treating extension for Google Wave.

The "Tricky" extension uses all of the Wave APIs together to create an interactive Halloween experience. First, the extension installer gives you an option in your New Wave menu to "Go Trick or Treating". When you click that, it creates a new wave and inserts a gadget (try clicking around that to see what surprises await). Then, whenever a user types 'trick or treat', the robot fetches an image from Google Image Search for either a yummy candy bar, or well, something not that yummy. Now, all of you world-wide developers can go trick or treating together, by visiting this WaveSandbox.com sample wave -- and learn the Wave APIs at the same time, by browsing through the code.

Have fun, and let us know in the forum if you found other wave-y ways to celebrate Halloween.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] Google Wave is headed to Europe: Join us!

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:24:54 GMT

Back in May and June, members of the Google Wave team traveled the world meeting developers in the SF Bay Area, Asia, and South America. Now, we're heading to Europe, and we're eager to meet all the European developers that are hacking on the Google Wave APIs.

There are many upcoming events — with links for registration and more details:

London, England

Oct. 26: GTUG London

Vienna, Austria

Oct 27: TechEd SAP

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Oct. 28: Dutch GTUG
Oct. 30: eComm Europe 2009

Zurich, Switzerland

Nov. 2: Google Wave Te ch T alk

Prague, Czech Republic

Nov. 6: Google Develope r Da y: Pra g ue

Moscow, Russia

Nov. 10: Google Developer Day: Mos cow

Munich, Germany

Nov. 11: GTUG Munich

We're looking forward to updating you on all things Google Wave, chatting with you about what you've already built, and hearing what else you'd like to do with Google Wave APIs.

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager, Google Wave

[wavecamp] Google Wave at GTUG London: Monday, October 26

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:09:55 GMT

I'm happy to announce that the Google Wave team will be presenting at a specially-arranged London GTUG meetup on Monday, October 26. Stephanie Hannon and Lars Rasmussen will give a talk about Google Wave and the APIs that are currently available, and discuss some of what we've learned as a result of the developer preview and where we're headed next. There will also be ample time for Q&A, and you're welcome to submit questions beforehand. We hope to meet a lot of current WaveSandbox.com developers, and inspire others to get started building great extensions. No need to wait for the talk though — you can jump in and check out the docs and the samples.

The event will be held at the Google London office at 6pm on Monday, October 26. We have limited seats, so act fast to request yours. Please sign up here.

We look forward to seeing many of you there! If you're in Europe, but can't make it to London — stay tuned for another post talking about the rest of the European tour.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] Google Wave Samples Gallery: Best Practices & New Features

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:16:24 GMT

The Google Wave Samples Gallery has been a great way to see what developers have been creating and find starter code to build on. We added a search box to enable developers to find what they're looking for, but we heard that it still wasn't easy to find examples of code that uses a particular class/method or does one particular task. So, we've added a few new features to the gallery:

Best Practices

Some samples just demonstrate a fun and inspiring use of the API, but others demonstrate a nice use of a particular API feature, like how a robot can set the state of a gadget, or how a gadget can store per-participant keys. We wanted to call out these samples and make them easier to find, so we've added a "best practice" badge, highlighted these samples on the front page, and added a filter. We've also added a form field to the submit page, so that developers can tell us what aspects of the APIs their sample shows off.

Indexed Code Repositories

When a developer submits a sample, they must also submit a URL that points at their source code. Most of the time, this URL is to a public SVN or GIT repository. We've now added these URLs to the custom search engine that powers the search box, so that when you search, you'll also get results from code files. This makes it easier to find usage of particular parts of the API. Search for "GetDocument" as an example.

Code Snippets

When a developer submits a sample, they can specify that they're submitting a "Code Snippet" or a "Working Sample". With a code snippet, instead of providing links to the robot address, gadget XML, or installer XML, they need only to provide useful lines of code. You can use this to share some bit of code that you've written, even if you don't want to share the whole sample. And if at some point you want to change a snippet into a working sample, you can do that. Check out my Send Email from a Robot snippet for an example.

We hope that you will find these new features useful while you're designing your own Wave-y extensions. And, don't forget to subscribe to the recent samples ATOM feed to find out about new samples in the gallery.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

[sixtus42] (Image)

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:51:47 GMT

[Reposted from jotbe]

[sixtus42] "This project is intended to create for emacs a mode specifically designed for..."

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 22:59:09 GMT

"This project is intended to create for emacs a mode specifically designed for Google Wave. The major parts of this project are the Java-based backend that connects to the server, and the emacs elisp code that connects to that backend and exchanges data with it, and the emacs UI for interacting with Wave."

– wave-client-for-emacs - Project Hosting on Google Code

[wavecamp] What happened in the Wave sandbox

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 22:54:41 GMT

My favorite day since we started the developer preview at Google I/O? Aug 7th. Alexander Dreiling flew down to visit the Wave team from SAP's research lab in Brisbane. He showed us a 7 min video of Gravity, a Google Wave extension that facilitates real-time, collaborative development of business processes. I never thought I'd see grown men cry over business process modelling.

Why the tears? Alex, Kathrin Fleischmann (SAP Research) and Soeren Balko (SAP NetWeaver BPM development) built a demo that highlights the power of the Google Wave platform to make complex tools live and collaborative. In the video, many team members collaborate in real time to build a model. Each piece of the model is colored based on the person that added it. The team discusses the model. Someone adds another participant midway through the development. That person uses playback to catch up on what they missed. And there is even a robot that checks and fixes semantic errors. In the end, a manager checks the work on her iPhone. Even Lars was floored and he is not easily impressed!

Salesforce.com also gave the team a virtual pat on the back when they sent over this video showing the Service Cloud's rich customer support experience in Google Wave. A mobile phone customer starts a wave with a company-supplied support robot. The robot creates a tracking record and pulls rich help content into the wave based on the customer's comments. When the problem isn't solved, the robot seamlessly brings the matter to the attention of a live agent, who can see the wave embedded in a familiar tool and interact with it there. Private replies let the agent consult colleagues before responding to the customer. All in a single wave.

Since Google I/O, more than 27,000 developers have been prototyping with the Google Wave APIs. Amazingly, these developers persevered, found work arounds, and advocated for new features when our APIs didn't do what they needed. Our APIs have made a fair bit of progress since May. Now you can build robots that control gadgets, providing a mechanism for tight integration with a rich UI. We've also made it easier to build extension installers to help people understand share extensions with their friends. The visual experience for interacting with gadgets has also been improved. We open sourced the Java Robots API. And made lots and lots of bug fixes.

While Salesforce.com and SAP's demos are still prototypes, we are featuring a small set of amazing extensions ready to use today. LabPixies created a Sudoku gadget that lets you compete to solve a Sudoku Puzzle. A happy distraction in the hectic days leading up to September 30th! (Although I wish Lars would let me win once in awhile...) 6Rounds.com has integrated their rich video conference experience into Google Wave. It has amazing effects like making it snow or even simulating fire! AccuWeather has built a neat extension that lets you add weather forecasts to your event planning waves. Voice conversation is one of Google Wave's most commonly requested features, and we were thrilled to see Ribbit's gadget for managing telephone conferences. Lonely Planet built a very rich trip planning tool. Our own Pamela Fox updated the Google Maps gadget we have been using in our demos.

As we've talked about in the past, we're still working hard to improve the documentation and evolve the preview quality APIs to make it easy to build wave-y extensions. We're also working on larger changes like providing anonymous read-only access to embedded waves -- so anyone in the world will be able to see content of published waves. To help foster a strong developer ecosystem, we're exploring plans for a monetizable wave extension store.

To all sandbox developers, thank you for your patience, feedback, creativity and riding the sometimes bumpy waves with us. You will get accounts on wave.google.com tomorrow - check your sandbox account for instructions on how to login. You'll also get invitations to bring on people you want to wave with or have try your extensions. Google Wave is more fun with friends or colleagues to collaborate with so use your invitations wisely!

If you're feeling inspired to build an extension to Google Wave, sign up to give the APIs a spin, check out the developer's guide, and read the design principles. If you come up with something "wave-y" don't forget to let us know when you have extensions ready for users to try.

Stephanie Hannon, Google Wave Product Manager

[wavecamp] Google Wave in Internet Explorer

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:32:39 GMT

When we extend our Google Wave preview next week, we will encourage users of Internet Explorer to install Google Chrome Frame, an open source plug-in that brings HTML5 and other open web technologies to Internet Explorer.

On first login to Google Wave, Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 users will see this message:

A few clicks later, the user will be running Google Wave in Internet Explorer, but it will be every bit as fast as in Google Chrome!

Google Wave depends on strong JS and DOM rendering performance to provide a desktop-like experience in the browser. HTML5's offline storage and web workers will enable us to add great features without having to compromise on performance. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer, still used by the majority of the Web's users, has not kept up with such fairly recent developments in Web technology. Compared with other browsers, the JavaScript performance is many times slower and HTML5 support is still far behind. Likewise, the many different versions of IE still in use -- each with its own set of CSS quirks and layout limitations -- further complicates building rich Web applications.

In the past, the Google Wave team has spent countless hours solely on improving the experience of running Google Wave in Internet Explorer. We could continue in this fashion, but using Google Chrome Frame instead lets us invest all that engineering time in more features for all our users, without leaving Internet Explorer users behind.

It is remarkable how quickly the browser landscape has changed since Lars and his brother Jens wrote the first prototype of Google Maps back in early 2004. Back then, Internet Explorer was their browser of choice. These are exciting times indeed to be developing for the Web!

Happy waving!

Posted by Lars Rasmussen, Google Wave team manager, and Adam Schuck, Google Wave client tech lead.

[wavecamp] Google Wave Extension Updates

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 02:56:01 GMT

Over the past few months we've learned more about how extensions are used in Google Wave, and made it easier to create and install extensions. To help you build user-friendly extensions, we've prepared two new documents:

1) Google Wave Extension Design Principles

Make it Wave-y
Make it Easy to Use
Make it Easy to Install
Make it Look Good
Make it Useful -- or Fun!

2) Extension Installers Guide

Understand the extension manifest file
Learn about extension hooks and actions
Walk through installing an extension

We're looking forward to promoting extensions to users as they get access to Google Wave. If you're building extensions, please check out the above documents, and then let us know when your extension is ready.

The Extension Design Principles are perhaps more aspirational than attainable with our current, preview-quality APIs. We are working hard on making things better. For example, we are adding hooks that let robots be added automatically to the right waves at the right time, we are adding OAuth-based RPC access so robots can initiate requests to modify waves (which among other things will supercede our cron mechanism), and we are adding to gadgets the ability to display diffs when users open waves and during playback.

As always, our goal is to make it possible to write rich, collaborative applications with Google Wave that feel to users as natural as Google Wave's own features. We appreciate the vocal and detailed feedback that we have received during these first few months of our developer preview. Thank you for your patience and testing of the Wave APIs.

Happy hacking!

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager, Google Wave

[oneaim] PyGoWave Server - The Python Google Wave Server - Django based/ OpenSource

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:53:38 GMT

http://code.google.com/p/pygowave-server/

[oneaim] The Google Wave APIs: Robots, Gadgets and Embedding

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:33:59 GMT

The Google Wave APIs: Robots, Gadgets and Embedding

[oneaim] Bericht Google Wave Hackathon Düsseldorf – Tag 2 | Alexander Benker

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:25:11 GMT

http://blog.abenker.com/2009/08/01/google-wave-hackathon-tag-2/

[oneaim] Google Wave in den Wissenschaften — Wavetank

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:06:47 GMT

http://wavetank.de/2009/08/google-wave-in-den-wissenschaften/

[oneaim] Google Wave als Business Application? Fragen nach der Business-Tauglichkeit von Wave

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:05:51 GMT

http://wavetank.de/2009/08/google-wave-business-application/

[oneaim] Google Wave Introduction - 12 slides presentation

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:57:38 GMT

Introduction Google Wave - Google Wave Introduction - 12 slides presentation

[oneaim] Google Wave Keyboard Shortcuts

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:29:59 GMT

http://blog.abenker.com/2009/08/01/google-wave-keyboard-shortcuts/

[oneaim] " Notizen vom Wave Hackathon Düsseldorf:1. Google Wave ist an erster Stelle..."

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:08:59 GMT

" Notizen vom Wave Hackathon Düsseldorf:
1. Google Wave ist an erster Stelle ein Kollaborations-Tool
2. Was macht Google Wave so interessant?
3. Das Interface von Wave muss sich weiterentwickeln!"

–Google Wave wird Dateien abschaffen (Notizen vom Wave Hackathon) - flyingsparks

[sixtus42] "This article will step through a variety of suggestions that will make gadget..."

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 10:47:59 GMT

"This article will step through a variety of suggestions that will make gadget debugging easier. Note that the Google Wave sandbox as well as the Google Wave APIs are in preview mode, and we hope to develop tools to make debugging easier in the future, and update this article accordingly."

–Debugging Wave Gadgets

[sixtus42] "What Are Wave Extensions? Wave extensions are a way to augment the functiona..."

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 10:47:08 GMT

What Are Wave Extensions?

Wave extensions are a way to augment the functionality of waves and the wave client. Currently, the Wave API supports the following extensions:

Robots: Robots are applications which can be added to waves as automated wave participants. Robot extensions commonly automate tasks, but can also participate in the wave as a participant, interacting with the conversation based on their capabilities. For more information, see the Robots API Overview and Developer Guide.
Gadgets: Gadget extensions provide a shared program which runs within the wave, and to which all participants have access. For more information, see the Wave gadgets Developer Guide.

–Wave Extensions - Google Wave API - Google Code

[sixtus42] YouTube - ProcessOne Wave Demo 1

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:28:17 GMT

YouTube - ProcessOne Wave Demo 1

[sixtus42] via Cubicle Muses - Wave's Web of Protocols

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:00:18 GMT

via Cubicle Muses - Wave's Web of Protocols