Slashdot Mirror
Google Open Sources Wave Protocol Implementation
eldavojohn writes "Certainly one of the most important steps in adopting a protocol is a working open source example of it. Well, google has open sourced an implementation of the wave protocol for those of you curious about Google's new collaboration and conversation platform. It's been reviewed, skewered and called 'Anti-Web' but now's your chance to see a Java implementation of it. The article lists it as still rapidly evolving so it might not be prudent to buy into it yet. Any thumbs up or thumbs down from actual users of the new protocol?"
It seems to be a different approach to the same problem, with Croquet using distributed synchronization of computation rather than synchronized distribution of updates.
I think the whole idea of wave is AWESOME. My one question is ... how is Google going to make money off of it???
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Wave is surely an interesting concept and application, but if there's any web app that just makes you want to scream for a native implementation, it's Wave.
I think focusing on making one cross platform Web application that can be embedded into Web pages is probably the most effective use of their resources. No one is going to bother downloading a client unless there is some significant use of Wave first or it is being deployed in a corporate/large organization setting. Google needs to get it out there and a Web app makes a lot of sense as a first attempt.
Why is Google spoiling good concepts by tying them to the browser exclusively? They just need to develop for the three major platforms, Windows, Linux and OS X.
Again, I disagree. For geeks, maybe this would make sense if Google had the resources to accomplish it at the same time as creating the Web application, but for normal users this isn't going to happen. Most users just don't install things like this or they'd have a Jabber client by now. How many people with Jabber clients right now do you think have ichat compared to all the other clients out there. What Google needs to do is push this as a Web app and then partner with other companies to get them to develop native clients to be pre-installed on their respective platforms and Web services. By open sourcing the Web client Google potentially gets AOL, Yahoo, and MS to expand their chat and e-mail clients both on the Web and the desktop. By talking to Apple they might get this on OS X and/or the iPhone by default. Someone will write a native Linux client no matter what Google does. There will eventually be clients for Windows and OS X, but very few people will use them if they aren't pre-installed with their computer or unless Wave really takes off on the Web first.