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Google Wave Backstage

Posted by kdawson on from the movie-by-peter-weir dept.

As Google Wave is about to be released to 100,000 beta testers tomorrow, reader snitch writes in with a link to an in-depth interview with Dhanji Prasanna, whose title is Core Engineer. It covers some of the technologies, tools, and best practices used in building Wave. "InfoQ: Would you like to give us a short technical outline of what happens to a message (blip) from the moment a user types it in the web client, until becomes available to every one else that is participating in that wave — humans or robots? ... Dhanji: Sure, a message written in the client is transformed into a series of operations that are sent to the server in real time. After authenticating and finding the appropriate user session, the ops are routed to the hosted conversation. Here these ops are transformed and applied against other incoming op streams from other users. The hosted conversation then broadcasts the valid set of changes back to other users, and to any listening robots. This includes special robots like the ones that handle spell checking, and one that handles livesearch (seen in the center search-panel), as well as explicit robotic participants that people have developed. Robotic participants write their changes in response to a user's and these are similarly converted into ops, applied and re-broadcast."

7 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Cautiously Optimistic by rehtonAesoohC · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have to say that I am excited about the prospects of a chat/im/document/wiki/social network collaboration system all rolled into one, but I am very skeptical if they will be able to pull it off the way they have been touting it.

    For starters, most people are very well ingrained into their way of using the particular applications that accomplish the things Wave does (all independent of each other), so I think a massive component to the success of Wave will be how good the integration tools will be. Will we be able to import contacts from Exchange straight into Wave? Will we be able to use waves in email services other than wave? IE: Could a wave user interact with a wave with someone who is using MS Exchange the same way as they interact with someone who is using Wave also?

    That said, I think Wave could seriously revolutionize the standard of email communication, and I really hope for all our sake they are able to pull it off.

    1. Re:Cautiously Optimistic by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I doubt that they will initially, wave certainly wasn't designed to be protocol compatible with any of that; but it is (conceptually) simple enough to see how it would all fit together.

      If you are using jabber, you can't talk to AIM users, because AIM doesn't speak XMPP. However, there are "gateway" mechanisms that speak XMPP on one side, and talk to AIM on the other, that allow you to, transparently(to you), communicate with AIM users from a jabber client.

      In the same fashion, the existing services won't talk to wave, and wave won't know what to make of their inputs either; but it would be (conceptually) simple enough to build interfaces that communicate with existing services on one side, and talk to wave on the other. Whether or not third parties will bother to write decent implementations of such mechanisms is a separate question; and how well this would work depends strongly on that; but integration would certainly be possible, given a decent level of motivation.

    2. Re:Cautiously Optimistic by hjmiii · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I agree, though if MS were smart they could look in their own backyard and subvert the subversion. I think OneNote would be one of the best Wave clients out there.

    3. Re:Cautiously Optimistic by js_sebastian · · Score: 2, Interesting

      One of the most important difference b/w how Exchange and Wave work is that the later is hosted by Google and hence controlled by it.

      Bullshit. It is an open protocol. In fact, I plan to run my own wave server whenever code for it is released. If this takes off like google hopes, every company/institution will be running its own wave server just like today it runs its own email server.

  2. social networking, business collaboration... by circletimessquare · · Score: 5, Interesting

    nah, none of these things

    google wave is going to be the backbone of a thousand homebrew MMORPGs, probably nethack interface style at first, but i don't see why eventually it couldn't look like WoW

    heh, thanks google, for giving us our own battle.net to play with in the style of an easy programming interface

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
  3. Re:Where is the CLI version? by Mia'cova · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The parent wasn't referring to federation, which is the server-to-server communication. The parent was referring to client-server communication, in which google's servers and their web client are all wrapped up together. Correct me if I'm wrong, but he's saying that we wouldn't be able to write a rich-client for google's servers. So you'd need to start an independent server and build up a protocol from scratch essentially.

  4. You've got it right. by copponex · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's a real time protocol with built in journaling, that is both free and open. Think of it as HTML written after the knowledge that connections will be mostly persistent and fast. Waves are going to replace damn near everything displayed live on web pages. It's basically an open and extensible combination of wikis, sharepoints, calendaring, and web forums.

    Google OS + Waves + commodity hardware. If anything, at least the next version of windows will be much less expensive.