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 clearly can't be anti-web.
Too confusing. Requires a browser. Won't run on my iPod. Lame.
The CB App. What's your 20?
here from 4 days ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_wave#Product
That wasn't so hard, now was it?
I've read reviews of it as real time collaboration. Think of it as private e-mail, IM, and document collaboration all in one system.
-- "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings" -Optimus Prime
I for one feel bad for the helpless telecoms. They have done everything in their power provide nothing but exceptional service to customers over the past 30 years, including protecting our privacy and investing in infrastructure ~/sacrasm. Regardless of 'infringing' business models, we should be rejoicing the opportunity to compliment the current, and broken, communication model. By providing an alternative protocol with specific functionality it's not replacing current technology, simply enhancing it. Let's just hope it's not a product of the PR machine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave_Federation_Protocol ?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Many people have responded to your post with links, but I know people are really, really, really lazy. So Google Wave is kind of a nifty new communications paradigm designed to replace e-mail, IM, IRC, and other collaboration tools. The basic idea is to create communications centered around a conversation with as many participants as needed, rather than trying to take a two way communication like a letter and expand it to sort of work for more people.
If you're the only person in the conversation (or wave) online, it works like e-mail. As soon as a second person is online at the same time, it works like IM. It is sort of timestamp version controlled so you can rewind conversations and see how the conversation branched and you can embed the conversations in generic Web pages. It's extensible so you can add additional communications to it, and they've added a way to post images and host them as photo galleries.
In short it's new, but similar in ways to IM and e-mail and it's fairly cool, but watching a video makes more sense than reading a lengthy explanation.
It defines a protocol that allows servers to publish documents with threaded conversations, and allow users on different servers to edit those documents and append to the threaded conversations in real-time. It also defines an API that lets developers extend the kind of media that can be placed in the documents, and make documents interactive with the user or other services. It also uses a messaging semantic based on operational transformation, that allows users to browse the complete editing history of any document or thread, and allows agents observing a document to resolve their local state by reading a document as a stream of deltas (it's more complicated than this, but I have yet to wrap my head around OTs completely).
People say it's like email because it lets you do messaging in non-real-time, and has threaded conversations, and documents and media attachments, and it's an open standard. People say it's like IM because conversations are posted to threads in real-time, keystroke-by-keystroke. People say it's like Google Docs (or other such things) because it allows collaborative editing of documents, except this lets you edit the document contemporaneous with other people, since the server protocol merges all updates to the document keystroke-by-keystroke.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I think that every web developer that misses this out, will pay it hard.
Experts say that true innovations are hard to detect. I would say, keep an eye on this, or you will regret it.
Err, try again. The whole point of wave is that google are open sourcing the spec, and plan to release an open source *server* reference implementation.
The concept of wave servers appears to be similar to that of smtp email. Companies can run their own internal servers, and configure links to the outside world as needed.
No, it is not necessary to run on a Google server, you can run your own server. Check out http://wave.google.com/ for info. Wave looks awesome - seriously awesome
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
just like "clouds", "waves" do not reside on your computer, but rather *out there* somewhere, that you can *probably* get access to if:
-the service is up and functioning properly
-you have the required hardware and software
-there are no connection issues between you and the server
You can set up your own wave server, just as you can with e-mail.
if your internet goes down, suddenly you've lost access to even internal communication at your office, as well as all archives and logs of past communication. Without local storage, you cannot do efficient search and retrieval of your own information.
Companies can set up their own wave servers and communications between members of the same server will never leave the network.
there are serious privacy issues as well, no doubt google will be surfin the "waves" looking for terms to market to you, but perhaps it is more shady than that even. google has agreed to censorship in foreign markets over the years, does it really make sense to let them hold onto your data in this way?
Yeah, they can - on their own server which will probably become the most popular one but you can use alternate servers to those of Google.
then again.. it's cool technology, and now that it's being open sourced, it means feasibly you can run your own "waveserver" and mitigate the issues above somewhat.
Not somewhat but pretty much equally to e-mail.
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
But isn't that what Chrome OS is for? Ultimately, Google wants the browser and the OS to be identical.
Why develop for three platforms and let geeks port that to many when you can develop as open source for one platform (DHTML) and actively encourage the geeks to port that to 3, and then to many?
Hell, if I worked at Google the last thing I would want would be to get involved in GNOME/KDE turf wars, piss off apple fanbois if it doesn't look precisely like a macintosh app or really develop anything for the Windows desktop. Like, ever. So instead, Google puts it on the Web where everyone can get at it from any modern platform (even/especially smartphones, and if you want a native copy then you or some hobbiests are free to write one (and thereafter support it :P)
Seriously, do you recall their last attempt at a Jabber desktop application, Gtalk? It even worked well, but then they dropped it like a bad habit in favor of the web-based version.
Additionally, one of their main design goals was to make Wave conversations embeddable into web pages. They would like this to be used for CMS, to replace forums, to replace blog comments, essentially they wish people to mash up Wave content with their own web pages. If they focused their deployment first to the desktop, they would miss out on that opportunity.
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.
What question?