WaveCamp soup

[wavecamp] Introducing Apache Wave

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 01:02:32 GMT

One of the best outcomes from November's Wave Protocol Summit was a proposal for Wave to enter the Apache Software Foundation's incubator program. Apache has a fantastic reputation for fostering healthy open source communities that create great software. Last week, that proposal was accepted, and we're spinning up the project infrastructure so that the community can continue to grow in the Apache way.

During the summit, it became quite clear that there is a healthy community of startups, independent developers, and industry partners enthusiastic to continue development of the Wave Federation protocols and Wave in a Box product. We've posted videos of the technical talks and demos presented throughout the summit so that those who couldn't make it to San Francisco needn't miss out.

The final days of the summit were dedicated to technical design and coding. Progress since then includes significant improvements to the wave panel, visual enhancements to the login pages, gadgets hooked up and working, improved development set-up and documentation, and a draft HTTP transport for wave federation.

In recognition of this work, we're proud to announce that the open source project leadership is expanding to include a number of new committers from outside Google: Tad Glines, Michael McFadden (Solute), James Purser, Ian Roughley (Novell), Anthony Watkins (SESI), and Torben Weis (University Duisburg-Essen). They are joining graduated Google interns Joseph Gentle and Lennard de Rijk as trusted contributors who have demonstrated high quality code and valuable design insight.

The creation of Apache Wave will serve to accelerate the growth of the existing community with strong open source processes. If you'd like to get involved, please join the Apache Wave mailing list (send an email to wave-dev-subscribe@incubator.apache.org). We're looking forward to working with you.

Posted by Alex North, Software Engineer, Google Wave team

[wavecamp] This Week's Wave Protocol Summit: Updates

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 02:27:45 GMT

We've just wrapped up day 3 of this week's Wave Protocol Summit in San Francisco. Developers and industry partners have gathered from all over the world to discuss the architecture of Wave, opportunities for use in enterprise, government, and consumer technology, and the future of the open source project. The last few days have included a great mix of architecture presentations, technical discussions, and interesting demos using Wave technology (WaveLook, Novell Vibe, Wave-vs.net, and others).

Since the Wave in a Box announcement in September, progress has been rapid. We've recently added:

a new wave panel, which is much prettier and a lot faster,
improvements to login and authentication,
robot and data API support,
support for Wave Gadgets,
new setup, installation guides and tutorials,
support for browers without websocket support (via socket.io),
designs for a file-based wave store, and
support for federation between instances of Wave in a Box (and wavesandbox.com).

Wave in a Box "out of the box"

You can keep up to date by following the Progress Reports wave.

For the rest of this week we'll be hacking on Wave in a Box, helping new contributors tackle some starter projects, resolving open issues, and adding even more functionality.

As a reminder, we'll continue running wave.google.com at least through the end of the year. We've also recently introduced a wave export feature. In addition, we're working on ways for you to access waves through Google Docs and we hope to share more on our progress soon.

If you're following along from home, we'll be sharing videos following the event -- but please join us in the Wave Protocol group.

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

[wavecamp] Join us at the Wave Protocol Summit

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 22:43:55 GMT

The Wave in a Box project is shaping up well and we're now posting regular progress reports to the group forum (the most recent is here). We've also created a list of starter projects, easy tasks for developers to get started contributing to the codebase. You can chat with some of the Wave engineers at the upcoming online office hours (in Google Wave). The next one is on Monday (Tuesday down under) - details are in the forum.

To bring the developer community together we are hosting a Wave Protocol Summit in San Francisco, November 2010. Through the summit we aim to grow the Wave developer community, share technical knowledge, and discuss the future of Wave technology and its community. The summit will be targeted towards technical people interested in using, contributing to, or building on Wave technology. Content will include:

technical talks on specific aspects of Wave technology,
problem solving around open technical issues,
discussions about project organisation and governance, and
group coding sessions (fun!).

The summit will be three days of talks and discussion (November 8 - 10) followed by two days of coding (November 11 - 12) on Wave in a Box and federation. We're still working out the detailed schedule, so stay tuned to the forums for further details (and give your feedback).

If you would like to join us, you can request a seat (due to capacity constraints, we'll confirm your seat in the coming weeks). To help improve the summit, please also suggest or request session content of particular interest to you.

In the meantime, see you on the forums!

Posted by Alex North, Google Wave team.

[wavecamp] Wave open source next steps: "Wave in a Box"

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 01:17:33 GMT

Since the announcement that we will discontinue development of Google Wave as a standalone product, many people have asked us about the future of the open source code and Wave federation protocol. After spending some time on figuring out our next steps, we'd like to share the plan for our contributions over the coming months.

We will expand upon the 200K lines of code we've already open sourced (detailed at waveprotocol.org) to flesh out the existing example Wave server and web client into a more complete application or "Wave in a Box."

This project will include:

an application bundle including a server and web client supporting real-time collaboration using the same structured conversations as the Google Wave system
a fast and fully-featured wave panel in the web client with complete support for threaded conversations
a persistent wave store and search implementation for the server (building on contributed patches to implement a MongoDB store)
refinements to the client-server protocols
gadget, robot and data API support
support for importing wave data from wave.google.com
the ability to federate across other Wave in a Box instances, with some additional configuration

This project will not have the full functionality of Google Wave as you know it today. However, we intend to give developers and enterprising users an opportunity to run wave servers and host waves on their own hardware.

Since the beginning, it has been our vision that the Google Wave protocols could support a new generation of communication and collaboration tools. The response from the developer community to date has been amazing and rewarding. Even more so now, we believe that developers and other projects are a critical part of this story.

While Wave in a Box will be a functional application, the future of Wave will be defined by your contributions. We hope this project will help the Wave developer community continue to grow and evolve. We'll discuss more technical details of our plan on the Wave Protocol Forum, which is the best place to keep up with the latest progress on the open source project and learn how you can contribute.

Wave on

Posted by Alex North, Software Engineer, Google Wave team

[wavecamp] Upcoming Wave Talks: Michigan & Washington, DC

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 03:51:40 GMT

Every so often, I leave this beautiful city of Sydney, Australia and depart for foreign lands to meet developers from around the world. This time, I'm heading to the states and dropping by two GTUGs (Google Technology User Groups) to talk about Google Wave and the APIs:

DC GTUG
Washington, DC
August 10, 6pm
Michigan GTUG
Southfield, MI
August 12, 6:30pm

After the GTUG talks, I'll also be swinging by the HTML5 GTUG campout in San Francisco, setting up waves for the teams to document their progress and ask questions.

If you're in the area, I hope to see you there!

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] Wave Visualizer: Turning Threads into Trees

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 23:54:55 GMT

Two years ago, I discovered the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit, a really cool library for doing visualizations in Javascript, like force-directed graphs, hypertree, treemaps, sunbursts, and more. Since then, I've been looking for an excuse to use the library in conjunction with a Google API, and after our latest API release, I found the perfect use.

A few weeks ago, we released a new feature in the data and robot APIs: threads. This feature means that developers can render threaded waves in alternative clients and export waves to other formats while retaining their true structure. It also means that I can finally use the InfoVis Toolkit, in order to visualize the threads in a wave as a structured tree.

To create the visualization, I started with the code for the Inbox Checker sample, a Python App Engine app that asks a user to authenticate (via OAuth), and then shows them their inbox and any wave they click on. I modified that app to output JSON instead of HTML for each wave, and I piped that JSON into the SpaceTree class from the toolkit.

Here's an side-by-side example of how a wave might look like in the client, and what it looks like as a SpaceTree:

You can try the app out for yourself here: Wave Visualizer. After granting access to the app, you can click each of the waves in your inbox and browse the tree for it. As you mouse over each blip, you'll see a snippet of the content of the blip in the tooltip. When you click on a blip, you'll be taken to that exact blip in the Wave client, utilizing our other new feature: blip linking.
(You can also try out the "Timeline" view, which shows the sequence of blips over time, using the Google Visualization API).

This app shows off one of my favorite features of Wave - flexibly structured conversations. Some waves are very flat long trees, and others are wide and deeply nested, and they are all made possible by the Wave conversation model. And now, thanks to the new Wave data APIs, apps like this are possible.

Enjoy playing around with the visualizer, and if you have any questions about building apps like it, stop by the Wave API forum and let us know!

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] Wave UI: Making your gadgets look & feel Wave-y

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 01:22:48 GMT

As part of my Google I/O talk on "Anatomy of a Great Extension", I talked about the optimal look & feel for Wave gadgets. On one hand, if your Wave gadget is based off an existing website, like the 6Rounds gadget, then we recommend mimicing the UI of your website inside the gadget, so that your existing users feel like they're using an extension of your website into Wave. On the other hand, if your Wave gadget is independent and designed purely for Wave, like many extensions in the gallery, then we suggest mimicing the UI of the Google Wave client itself, so that users feel like the gadgets fit inside their environment, and so that waves with multiple independent gadgets look cohesive. To make that easier for developers, we've introduced a new feature to the Wave Gadgets API, the wave.ui library, which makes it easy to turn your gadget elements into wave-styled elements.

For example, you might start with an anchor with some javascript onclick behavior:

<a id="button" href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="doIt()">Do Cool Stuff!</a>

You can then call makeButton and pass in the anchor element:

<script>
wave.ui.makeButton(document.getElementById("button"));
</script>

And, presto, your button will be wave-styled like this:

The wave.ui library also offers the loadCss, makeDialog, and makeFrame methods, and will expand to include additional methods as needed by developers.

For examples of gadgets using the new wave.ui library, check out the Flammard bible bot, which uses makeFrame for a multi-tabbed interface, or the Google Maps gadget, which uses makeDialog for a welcome screen and makeButton for the info window buttons.

As usual, please let us know in the forum how you're using this feature and if you have any questions.

Enjoy wave-styling!

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] Building Wave Gadgets with GWT

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:38:33 GMT

Hilbrand Bouwkamp is an independent internet developer/trainer/presenter specialized in RIA, GWT and Android. He has been following GWT and Wave since it's first release and has created two open source libraries related to GWT and Wave: cobogw and cobogwave.This blogpost is about the cobogwave library.

As soon as Google Wave was released and I had an account, I wanted to write a Wave Gadget. I believe Gadgets are one of the strengths of Wave because they let you add a structured component to an unstructured communication flow to make things more efficient. For example, a simple date picker Gadget can be added to an event-planning wave, and instead of people having to go to a separate site and communicate their date preferences manually, they can do the date-selection in the wave, and all of the information is stored in a single place. There are many situations like this where gadgets can add structure and keep related information together.

Since the Google Wave client itself is build with GWT (Google Web Toolkit), I thought it to be natural to write a Gadget with GWT. To do that, I needed to wrap the Wave Gadgets JavaScript API with my own GWT JSNI wrapper. Like other GWT gadget developers, I wrote my own wrapper - but I wanted to do it in a way that other developers could benefit from. So, I made sure that my wrapper included all of the Wave Gadgets API functionality, I wrote documentation for it, and I open-sourced it under the Apache 2 license as the cobogwave library. Now, other developers can skip the wrapper-writing step and simply focus on writing their gadget.

The cobogwave library makes it very easy to build gadgets for Wave. Just like the iGoogle GWT Gadgets API library, it defines a Needs interface: NeedsWave. By implementing the interface, you can make your gadget code Wave-enabled. Or, you can simply extend the WaveGadget class for the same effect.

GWT developers are accustomed to work with handlers, so the cobogwave library provides much of its functionality via handlers. For example, you can register for the ModeChangeEvent to be notified when the user changes from playback to edit mode, ParticipantUpdateEvent when a new user is added or removed to the wave, and StateUpdateEvent when the gadget receives a new state. The cobogwave library also has support for experimental functionallity in the Wave Gadget library, like the Wave UI Widgets Button, Frame and Dialog.

Recently, I was involved in the latest release of the gadgets support in the Google API Libraries for GWT. In the new version, it's much easier to implement RPC calls to your own server, and this method also works for Wave Gadgets.

Here's a sampling of diverse range of gadgets that developers have built using the cobogwave library:

Shortyz: Lets you solve crosswords together in a wave - ported from Android code.
MindMap: Lets you create an interactive mindmap, and favorite nodes up or down.
Karma: Lets participants in a Wave rate each other.
Pongy: Lets you play the classic game "Pong" with a fellow Wave user. (This last gadget was written by me to showcase the highly interactive possibilities of Wave.)

To start building your own Wave Gadgets with GWT, visit the cobogwave project page and to keep informed on updates, follow me on Twitter.

Posted by Hilbrand Bouwkamp, Community Developer

[wavecamp] Behind the Scenes of the Wave API Python Client Library

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 04:06:38 GMT

When I heard that Australia was going to have its very own PyCon, I knew I wanted to give a talk. While working on the with the Wave APIs over the last year, I've gotten to the point where I'm using the Python client library on a daily basis, and I've learnt a lot about Python from our library. I wanted to give a talk that would be interesting both to Wave API developers and to Python developers and would force me to dig deeper into the depths of our client library.

So, I presented a talk called "Wave Robots API: Behind the Scenes", with the goal of showing how we used Python to abstract on top of our HTTP API. I started with an overview of Google Wave and a quick look at Wave's core technology — the conversation model and operational transformation algorithm — so that everyone in the room would be comfortable with me talking about blips, wavelets, operations, and the like. Then I went deep into the robots API, explaining the JSON-RPC protocol between the Wave server and robots, and showing how the Python client library serializes the JSON into Python objects, how it lets developers register for events, and how it signs outgoing requests using OAuth. I then explained how we designed the client library to be hosting-provider-agnostic, and live demoed a robot that I created using the Django framework on a slicehost node. I finished with a summary of the most important features of the client library — versioning, automation, authentication, flexibility, and being Pythonic.

But, hey, if all that sounds interesting to you, you don't have to read about it -- you can watch it! Check out the video here, and the slides here. If you have any questions after watching, just head over to our Google Wave API forum.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] Developers Wanted: Help create an open source Wave-based forum

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 00:21:22 GMT

David Crane is an external Wave developer, involved in the development of the Debatewise extension. We've invited him to post on this blog to share his vision for an open source project.

A few months ago, the Google Wave team open-sourced the code underlying Forum Botty, the robot that is powering the Wave API forum. We want to continue developing this code base into a powerful and generic extension for running forums in wave, and we're hoping that other developers like you will join us in this project.

Google Wave offers a number of benefits over traditional forum software, with just its native functionality. However, by incorporating some of the tried-and-tested features from forums into a robot, we could turn Google Wave into the ultimate platform for forum-based discussion.

A forum could be a killer app for Wave. It’s a tool that people already use in huge numbers for specific purposes, are used to keeping separate to their email, and will dip in and out of as required. Wave is similar enough for them to jump in quickly and different enough for them to get, and be hooked by, the benefits. A forum removes the need for people to find things to use Wave for and means they could use it even if none of their friends did. Wave could enhance and improve upon some of the most important features of a forum and through acclimatisation, will encourage them to use it for a world of other purposes.

There are three specific areas we believe need developing

Goal: Allow people to coalesce around a subject of their choosing and help them find Waves of interest
Tasks: Group waves around subject areas. List the following alongside each Wave title: the total number of blips in the wave (including read/unread), total number of views, date/time of last post and who made the post. Later add ways of rating, sorting and categorising the Wave.

Goal: Encourage and reward participation in the conversations
Tasks: Add karma mechanisms, applause and trophies so Waves, blips and users can be rated. Incorporate tiered participation levels and privileges (eg StackOverflow).

Goal: Develop trust mechanisms so people can determine who to rely upon or ignore
Tasks: Link waves with Google Profiles (or other profiles), display the user’s trophy cabinet, list all posts by user and their ranking in the community

We’re looking for Python, Java and Javascript developers, QA testers and anyone with an interest in forum software, community building and online discussion. All software will be licensed under Apache 2.0, the same open source licence that Google Wave uses.

This project is organised by Debatewise.org, a non-profit debating web site whose goal is to be the Wikipedia of debate. Anyone can create a debate on any subject they like and anyone can edit and strengthen that debate. In this way and over time the debates become stronger, more definitive and an ever-greater resource for anyone looking to make up their mind.

If you're interested in joining the project, please wave me at dh.crane@googlewave.com.

Posted by David Crane, Debatewise

[wavecamp] Wave Federation Keeps Growing: Rich text editor is open source

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 14:52:57 GMT

As you may have heard before, the Google Wave Federation Protocol is an emerging open protocol for improving communication and collaboration across the web -- not just in a single product. To further propel the community, as part of Google I/O, we open sourced another significant chunk of Google Wave production code (now totaling more than 200,000 lines of code released), including: the in-browser rich text editor, the wave model, and the concurrency control mechanism.

This code release introduces a simple web client for FedOne, which enables you to bring up your own browser-based client running against the FedOne backend, which can then federate over to WaveSandbox.com. The web client communicates with the FedOne server using an emerging WebSocket-based client/server protocol, with the initial documentation in the whitepaper under review. There is even work going on to make an Emacs client for wave using this emerging client/server protocol. To get started with your own instance, please read a recent forum post: exploring the simple web client, and you may also be interested in reading the wave model code walk-through.

There is a growing community of wave providers building on wave technology and the Google Wave Federation Protocol, including SAP StreamWork (demo below, and you can read more about SAP StreamWork and the wave protocol), Novell Pulse (here's a demo), ProcessOne's OneWave, wave-vs.net , and AboutPeers.com. The US Navy also put out a call for proposals earlier in the year (Navy Wave RFP [PDF]). Additionally, there are several open source projects in development as well: PyGoWave, QWave, ARWave, and Ruby on Sails.

Here's a video showing SAP StreamWork federating with WaveSandbox.com:

This is all driven by the desire to let users work together no matter what system they may be using. For more information about building your own wave provider, feel free to check out the session video and slides from Google I/O 2010.

Please join us in the forum if you'd like to get involved.

Posted by J.D. Zamfirescu, and Anthony Baxter, Software Engineers, Google Wave

[wavecamp] Running a Contest in Wave: Behind the Scenes

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 12:45:38 GMT

Back in April, we ran a challenge together with Mashable, asking developers to make fun and useful extensions. We saw a lot of great extensions come out of it, like WaveTube, Poker, Wave Transformer, and more. Now, I want to take some time out to explain how an open-sourced Wave robot made it possible to run the contest entirely in Wave, from the submission to the voting.

1) Submission Wave

The process is all kicked off by the creation of a new submission wave.

To submit an entry, developers would install the Mashable Submitty extension. They then clicked 'New extension submission' in the New Wave menu, and watched a robot populate the new wave with a submission template. The robot does this by responding to the WaveletSelfAdded event, and appending text, form elements, and a gadget. The text describes the submission process, the form input elements let the developers give the robot information in a structured way, and the gadget manages the flow of submission.

2) Installer Checking

The robot helps automate some of the more tedious aspects of the review process, like checking an installer is valid.

When the developer is filling in the wave, they specify the URL of the installer XML in one of the input elements. When the robot sees a URL in that field, it grabs the XML, and parses it to look for all the required fields. If there are any errors, it reports them in an inline blip, and if not, it inserts the installer element inside that blip. By doing this, the reviewers can easily install the extension from inside the wave.

3) Workflow Gadget

The workflow gadget helps manage the sequence of steps, and let some participants move the sequence forward.

When the wave is first created, the only participants are the developer and the robot. When the developer is done filling out the information, they click "Share with Reviewers" in the gadget, which prompts the robot to add the review team Google Group and tag the wave with status-review. At that point, the gadget shows different options depending on who's viewing it. For the developer who submitted the extension, the gadget explains that the wave is currently shared with the team and will be responded to soon. For the admins of the review process, the gadget provides a "Approve for Gallery" button. When an admin clicks that button, the robot first checks that the event actually came from an admin (just in case someone's simulated the button click in javascript) and then kicks off the process to add the extension to the gallery.

4) Gallery Waves

The robot automates the process of creating individual waves that are rich in content, and of creating one central table of contents wave.

After the extension is approved, the robot starts by creating an individual wave about the extension - inserting the title, description, installer, a ratings gadget, and a sharing gadget. Since gadgets don't have access to the wave content around them, the robot injects the extension name into the state of the sharing gadget so users can easily tweet about it (e.g. "Checking out Requesty- http://www..."). Next, the robot fetches the table of contents wave using the Active API and appends an image and links for the new extension.

All in all, the Submitty extension helps automate a multi-step process in Wave while still allowing for freeform discussion. In the submission waves, we would often go back and forth with the submitter when trying out the extension and start up private replies to discuss the status of the extension with just the reviewers. In the gallery waves, wave users would report bugs and request features, and on the discussion wave for the most popular extension, Mr. Ray, they even got into a passionate discussion about the future of wave.

If you're interested in running a contest in wave or employing a similar workflow for your own use, check out the code for Mashable Submitty from the samples gallery. Let us know in the forum if you have any questions.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] Highlights from the Google I/O Wave Developer Sandbox

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 05:54:24 GMT

We recently celebrated Google Wave's 1st Birthday and announced several API and protocol updates at Google I/O. Along with that we invited 17 partners and developers to showcase their Wave extensions and integrations as part of the Google Wave Developer Sandbox. We've been amazed at the many extensions and product integrations that developers have built eversince we launched Wave and we wanted to share with the public what were showcased at I/O:

Extensions:

Columbus Internet showcased Travel WithMe and Hostel WithMe, their useful trip planning extensions for Wave.

ProcessWave showcased a collaborative diagram editor that supports software and business process modeling with UML, BPMN and EPC.

Timebridge showcased a web conferencing gadget and a meeting planner gadget.

UnaWave demoed a project and task management extension.

WithWaves demoed the Browse eBay and Browse Amazon extensions that enable collaborative shopping.

Wave.to showcased a lightweight wave client for the Android platform.

CS Odessa demoed their brainstorming and mind maping extension.

Caseish showcased their collaborative case management tool.

6Rounds showcased their interactive video conferencing gadget.

Prezi demoed their collaborative presentation editor.

Twillio demoed their phone conferencing robot

Product Integrations:

ProcessOne demoed their WaveOne XMPP server built based on the Wave protocol.

Salesforce demoed their wave integration inside Chatter, their collaborative product.

Oracle demoed their wave integration inside their CRM product.

Federation:

SAP demoed their new Gravity product built based on the Wave protocol.

Novell showcased Pulse, their collaborative product based on Wave protocol.

To see videos of many of the above extensions in action and read more about them, check out our featured extension page. We hope these extensions and product integrations will inspire you to build more things on Google Wave. As always, we love to hear from developers. If you have feedback on our APIs or want to build extensions, read our guide and drop us a line in the Wave APIs forum. If you're interested in the Wave Protocol, check out http://www.waveprotocol.org and join the Wave Protocol discussion forum.

Posted by Amanda Surya, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] Make your waves easier to find with savedSearchHook

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:25:29 GMT

One of my favorite features of Wave is "saved searches." When I use a search query that I want to remember to check later, I click "save search" at the bottom of the search panel, specify a title, and then that search shows up in my nav panel as a link. When a wave matching that search query show up in the search panel, it will be labeled with the saved search terms.

I use searches for lots of things - keeping track of waves for particular Google groups (e.g. "group:artisticwaves@googlegroups.com"), waves with particular tags (e.g. "tag:wavedevfaq"), waves I've contributed to ("with:me"), and oftentimes, waves created by a particular robot (e.g. "with:submitty-bot tag:status-inreview").

I always wished extensions could automatically save those searches for me, and today, I'm happy to announce that extension installers can now use the savedSearchHook to specify saved searches to be automatically added to the user's nav panel. For example, the Google I/O extension adds a saved search to make it easy to find all the conference waves, using this addition to the installer XML:

<savedSearchHook name="Google IO 2010" query="group:io2010-wave@googlegroups.com tag:io2010"></savedSearchHook>

For another example, the Tasky developer provides users with a "Tasky Extras" extension that adds a set of hooks for finding tasks in various stages of progress:

<savedSearchHook name="Tasky: All" query="with:me tag:task"></savedSearchHook> 
<savedSearchHook name="Tasky: Top-Level" query="with:me tag:task -tag:sub-task"></savedSearchHook> 
<savedSearchHook name="Tasky: Active" query="with:me tag:task -tag:status-completed -tag:status-canceled -tag:status-rejected"></savedSearchHook> 
<savedSearchHook name="Tasky: New" query="with:me tag:status-describing OR tag:status-notstarted OR tag:status-brainstorming past:1w"></savedSearchHook>

For more information, read through the extension installer documentation. Stop by the forum to ask any questions or to share your use of the feature.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] Google Wave platform updates at I/O: See what you can build now!

Wed, 19 May 2010 17:08:53 GMT

When we first launched Google Wave in developer preview mode at last year's I/O, thousands of developers started playing around on WaveSandbox.com, experimenting with the APIs, and checking out the preliminary set of specs and whitepapers on waveprotocol.org. Back then, many developers looked around and decided that they couldn't do what they wanted with the APIs yet, or the protocol wasn't fleshed out enough for their needs, so they filed their feature requests and slowly disappeared from the Wave world.

Today, we'd like to encourage all those developers to take a second look. Over the past year, and today at Google I/O, we've launched a series of improvements that make Wave a more compelling platform, product, and protocol, and enable the kind of apps and integrations developers first dreamed of when they encountered Wave.

Here's a quick recap of the last few months of API releases:

We introduced (and iterated on!) an extensions gallery, making it easier for users to find extensions.
We launched

Robots API v2 and the Active Robots API

, making it easier to integrate with external systems. That release, along with Mashable's Google Wave API Contest, resulted in robots like Ferry for Google Docs integration, Mr. Ray for email integration, and Salesforce.com's just-announced Force.com Toolkit for for the Google Wave APIs, which shows how developers can bring Google Wave together with the Force.com platform and Salesforce Chatter.

We released

anonymous read-only access for embedded waves

, making Wave a more compelling platform for publishing content and discussions on the web, and leading to some live blogging experiments.

And here's what we've announced at I/O:

Run robots on any server -- not just App Engine. This means you run robots on your own web servers, and you can use your language of choice, making it significantly easier to write robots that integrate with your existing website and systems. Read more in the docs.

Use a robot to

manipulate and retrieve attachments

within a wave, so you can build something like a wave -> Flickr album converter, a CSV -> interactive map builder, or as we'll be demo'ing live at the I/O talk, a wave -> PowerPoint exporter. Read more in the docs.

Use the

"Wave This"

service to let your website's visitors easily create waves out of the content on your site. You can see an example of it in use with the Wave This Chrome Extension. Read more in the docs.

Fetch waves on behalf of users with Wave data APIs

Google Wave Notifier Chrome Extension

[wavecamp] New features for Robots: Bundled Annotations, Inline Blips, Read-Only Roles

Wed, 12 May 2010 18:41:40 GMT

Over the last few releases, we've been rolling out incremental improvements to the robots API, based on the feedback from all of you developers. For those of you who haven't been reading the forum waves and changelogs, here's a summary of the new features:

Bundled Annotations:

When you're adding new text to a blip, you often want to annotate that text with a particular set of annotations. In the past, you had to calculate the range of that text and use the annotate operation, like so:

blip.append('New text')
blip.range(len(blip.text), len(blip.text)+8).annotate('style/fontWeight', 'bold')

This often led to off-by-1 errors and frustration. Now with bundled annotations, you can specify both the content to append and the annotation(s) to apply to that content, all in the same operation, like so:

blip.append('New Text', bundled_annotations=[('style/fontWeight', 'bold')])

For more information, read the announcement wave.

Inline Blip Positions:

Several robots produce alternate rendering of waves, like Mr. Ray and its "Wave Lite" view, and those robots needed to know the positions of inline blips inside other blips for a more accurate rendering. To help with this, we introduced a new attribute to the Blip classes to let robots access that position. For more info, see the Python or Java reference.

Read Only Roles:

A few months ago Google Wave launched the ability to have "Read-only" participants, which lets the creator of a wave set access rights for the other participants as either "full access" (the default) or "read only". We now offer that same ability in the API, so a robot that creates a wave can set the access rights of all the participants on the wave, like so:

new_wave.participants.set_role('public@a.gwave.com', wavelet.Participants.ROLE_READ_ONLY)

For more information, read the announcement wave.

Check out the new features, and let us know in the forum how you're using them in your robots.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] Embed API Improvements: Viewing public waves without a wave account

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:51:06 GMT

We recently introduced a new API for embedding waves, which includes a powerful new feature: anonymous, read-only access to public waves. Prior to this launch, webmasters could embed waves into their sites, but visitors could only see the content of the embedded wave if they had a Google Wave account, were logged in, and had access to that particular wave. Now, all waves with public@a.gwave.com (or a properly configured Google Group) as a participant can be embedded in a website so their content can be read by those who don't have a wave account (or simply aren't logged in).

You can view an example of this below or see it in action by visiting the KitchenSinky walkthrough documentation.

The new embed API also provides some optional parameters, like the ability to display participants in the the header panel or to include the toolbar. With an embedded wave, users are able to discuss topics in realtime and even catch up by playing back the exchange. Additionally, it provides a mechanism for staying involved in the conversation without requiring the user to constantly check the host site for updates.

To get started with the API, please visit the tutorial and consult the API reference.

If you're just interested in quickly getting a wave embedded on your site, you can simply make the wave and then get the code to paste into your site using the new Wave Element.

As you're diving in, here are a few ideas for ways to make use of embedded waves:

Use a wave to do live-blogging (or "live-waving" as we call it) about breaking news. You can provide up-to-the-second commentary for an election, earnings call, sporting event, or product announcement -- and even combine points of view from multiple bloggers into a single wave.
Display realtime RSVPs to an event with the Yes/No/Maybe gadget. Participants can also add comments for everyone to see.
Publish documentation or other articles via embedded waves. It's easy to update and readers can simply follow the wave to stay in the loop on changes. For example, we publish the Wave API release changelog as an embedded wave.
Take advantage of the active robots API and create waves programmatically for embedding in a variety of sites, such as a private messaging system for a social network, a shared collaborative workspace in a productivity tool, or as a customer support system.

We hope you find this new API and this new level of access useful, and we have more improvements to the embed API on the way. For example, at the moment, embedded waves do not work in Internet Explorer (even with Google Chrome Frame), but we will be resolving that issue.

We look forward to seeing what you come up with. If you have questions or comments, please discuss in the forum.

Posted by Dhanji R. Prasanna, Software Engineer, Google Wave team

[wavecamp] The API v2 Robots Have Risen: Check them out!

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 09:48:17 GMT

We launched the new Robots API (v2) last month, and since then, we've seen a a slew of new and interesting robots from Google Wave developers -- proving that robots can now be used in more ways than ever before.

We want to share some examples here, to give you a taste of the possibilities:

Pushy: This robot accepts any form of HTTP post and adds the content as a new message on the wave. It has special handling for the post-commit hooks on github and googlecode. The developer created this robot because he uses Google Wave at his company, and he wanted a way to have waves be updated based on their github project activity I've personally been using it to subscribe to updates on our google-wave-resources project. You can check out the source code from the samples gallery, and install it from the gallery wave. docXwave: This robot imports .docx (Microsoft Word) files into a wave, converting the formatting and even tables, using a table gadget. The developer is a part of Plutext, a group of developers working on various Microsoft Word related efforts and an open source OpenXML file converter python module. You can install it from the gallery wave. Ferry: This robot exports Google waves to Google documents, letting you specify if you want to continually export, and if you want to export everything or just the root blip. This is useful for people that want to export to a Google doc for the printing, exporting, or extra formatting capabilities. You can install it from the gallery wave. robot-robot: The robot lets you write code inside a wave, and run that code as a robot on another wave. This means that you can get started playing around with the APIs, without having to setup an App Engine account and your own project. I'm looking forward to using it for live demos and codelabs. You can check out the source code from the samples gallery, and install it from the gallery wave. You might also be interested in "as-a-robot", another robot-writing robot from a different developer. Great developers think alike! Mr. Ray: This robot makes it possible to use wave with people not on wave - you add their emails via a gadget, and the robot emails them a static copy of the wave. When they reply in the static interface, it syncs the reply back into the wave. It's a fantastic use of the proxying for feature in the new API, and of course, the active API. It's also incredibly useful - I'm using it to plan an event with high school friends, who are all highly addicted to their email system of choice. You can install Mr. Ray from the gallery wave.

If you're working on your own API v2 robots, be sure to share them in the forum and in the extensions gallery. We look forward to seeing what your creative minds come up with.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] 10 New Articles; 10 More Ways to Learn the Google Wave APIs

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 19:57:47 GMT

We've added 10 new articles to the documentation, written by both the Google Wave API team and developers like you, and we hope these articles will give you a new way of understanding how to use the APIs.

After launching the new robots API a month ago, robot developers have already written a bunch of articles about using it in various ways, from developing in Eclipse to integrating with Salesforce:

Simple Guides for Robot API v2: A series of sample robots that demonstrate accomplishing basic tasks in the new API. All samples are both in Java & Python.
Google Wave Java Robot Tutorial: Gives a detailed explanation of creating a basic Java robot, and then shows how to extend the robot to respond to commands.
Writing your First Google Wave Robot with Eclipse: Shows the steps of creating a basic Java Wave robot using the Eclipse IDE.
Writing a Salesforce Chatter Robot for Google Wave: Shows how to sync between Google Wave and Salesforce chatter, displaying Salesforce posts in a wave, and syncing wave replies to the Salesforce posts. Uses the Java SDK.
Using the Deferred Task Queue Library with the Python Wave Robots Library: Explains how to use the deferred library in the App Engine Python SDK to defer robot operations, like creating new waves or performing many operations in a row.
Responding to User Selection: Describes how to use the annotateSelection action in extension installers to create extensions, and more specifically, robots, that respond to and process user-selected text.

Meanwhile, gadget developers have been spreading their knowledge on writing gadgets, with articles on everything from Flex to GWT:

Developing gadgets for Google Wave: Explains what a wave gadget is, and how to develop a basic gadget.
5 Easy Steps To Create A Google Wave Gadget Using Flex: Presents a 5-part video tutorial to creating a counter gadget using Flex (Flash Builder and Flex 4, specifically).
Building a Wave Gadget Using GWT 2.0 & App Engine: Steps through the creation of a simple message-sharing gadget using GWT, App Engine, and the cobogwave GWT wrapper for the Gadgets API.
WaveConnector for GWT: Shows how to use the open-source WaveConnector library for developing Google Wave gadgets using GWT and testing them locally in hosted mode.

If you wrote an article yourself, please share it in the forum. Happy reading!

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] Google Wave Federation Protocol: More Docs, More Code

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 04:36:34 GMT

When we shipped the FedOne code to demonstrate the Google Wave Federation Protocol, we included some overview information and basic documentation on how to get it up and running. Since then, the community has stepped up and contributed some great documentation, and we wanted to highlight a couple of great resources that may be helpful to anyone interested in the Google Wave Federationn Protocol.

For example, Anthony Watkins wrote several articles to explain the architecture of the FedOne code:

In an effort to bring together this and other community-created resources in a single place, we've gathered links to Anthony's articles, along with links to articles by James Purser and Bryce into a wiki page. Be sure to check them out, and let us know if we've missed any great articles on the Google Wave Federation Protocol or the FedOne code. Share your links on the wave protocol discussion forum and we will update the wiki as they come in.

Also be sure to check out the new, recently open sourced wave document model code, as announced by J.D. in the Google Wave Protocol Forum:

We have just open sourced a significant new chunk of Google Wave source code: the wave document model. The new code, some thirty-eight thousand lines of code mainly in the org.waveprocotol.wave.model.document package, implements useful and efficient data structures for reading and manipulating wave documents. This is the same document model used by the Google Wave client and servers.

In case you missed it, Novell Pulse recently demonstrated federation with Google Wave.

Finally, be sure to visit us if you are attending Google I/O, there are some some great talks lined up, we hope to see you there!

Posted by Joe Gregorio, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] Developing with the Google Wave APIs - For a grade!

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 05:07:43 GMT

As a student at university, I always loved when I had the chance to use a Web API in my programming assignments. I think Web API programming is a great way for students to get a taste of the real world, and plus, APIs are just plain fun. :)

So, I was thrilled when I found out that a class of students in Singapore were working on a Google Wave extensions project, and I volunteered to give them a virtual talk. As part of the talk, I critiqued each of their final projects, giving them advice on making them "Wave-ier"and easier to use. Overall, I was incredibly impressed with the diversity & utility of their extensions - everything from adorable games to meeting planners:

Scrummy: This gadget lets you assign tasks to participants for particular "sprints", and then visualize the tasks for each sprint. Bubble Man: This super cute gadget let you play a game of balloon popping - if you pop the balloon next to the other player, you win. As a connoisseur of water balloon fights, I think this is an awesome game. Chess Room: This gadget displays a "room" of 6 tables. You can pick a "table", and enter it to a game of chess against another player. Note Sticker: This gadget lets you collect notes in a collaborative gadget, similar to desktop note apps (or similar to post-its on your physical desktop, if you're old school like that). WavePlan: This gadget lets participants select what days/hours they're available, to help in picking the best meeting time. yourBrainstormer: This slick looking gadget lets you create a sequence of parent and child nodes, and to navigate amongst them. NTI Language Translator: This gadget lets you translate text using the Google AJAX Language API, and it shares the currently translated text with others in the wave.

For the complete list and links to the extensions, visit the course project page.

Many of these are still in prototype form, but some of them are already user-ready and in the extensions gallery, like the yourBrainstormer extension, and others are in the samples gallery, like the Scrummy gadget. I hope that the students have the time to continue working on their extensions, and take them from a class assignment to an in-use web app. It's so cool that you can make something for a class *and* for thousands of users.

If you are a professor and thinking of using Google Wave in your programming assignments, you can grab the Latex/PDF for this class assignment, and you can browse the presentations gallery for slides to deliver for class lectures. Let us know if you have any questions in the forum.

Thanks to Professor Ben Leong for teaching his students about the Google Wave APIs, letting me talk with the students for a few brief virtual hours, and for getting students excited by the possibility of Web APIs.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

[wavecamp] Novell Pulse and Google Wave: Demonstrating Inter-company Collaboration

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 23:35:46 GMT

Ian Roughley is an architect on Novell Pulse, a new real-time collaboration environment for enterprises that federates with Google Wave so users of both products can work together using their tool of choice.

For Novell Pulse, it was a pretty easy decision to adopt the Google Wave Federation Protocol. For many months before Google Wave was announced to the world, we had been working on solving exactly the same problems: how to collaborate instantly and on‑demand; how to make collaboration easier for groups; how to expedite document workflow; and how to do it all in real‑time. We had also come to many of the same conclusions, and if you look at the products side‑by‑side you can see this reflected through the interfaces. Not exactly, but certainly the big decisions.

The Google Wave Federation Protocol excited us, because for the first time since email, it provided a way for collaboration systems to cooperate in a non‑silo'dway . The promise is that each organization can choose what product to use and the communication will flow unimpeded between the different systems, in the same way that people on different email systems can send and receive messages to each other today. This is a collaboration revolution we wanted to be a part of.

From a technical perspective we've leveraged the code Google has open sourced by integrating Google Wave's operational transformation algorithm and the federation parts of the FedOne implementation into Novell Pulse. This allowed us to quickly get the core federation protocol features working. We have developed our own editor, which provides compatibility with a large number of browsers, and provided a mapping from the Google Wave Conversation Model to our own internal structure. Along with the Google Wave Federation Protocol, we also support the Wave Gadgets API and are working to support the Wave Robots API. This allows extensions built by 3rd parties to work seamlessly with a mix of users on Novell Pulse and Google Wave.

Check out this video to see a business use-case of federation between Novell Pulse and Google Wave.

We're excited about the opportunities for open collaboration that utilizing the Google Wave Federation Protocol will bring to both the users of Novell Pulse and Google Wave, as well as a growing ecosystem of extension developers that now have broader distribution opportunities. For more information on Novell Pulse, visit www.novell.com/pulse.

Posted by Ian Roughley, Architect, Novell Pulse

[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