Google Wave Backstage

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."

Comments

Ew

[Anonymous Coward]

tl;dr:
"What happens when you type something in?"
"Well, it goes to a server and then the server decides to send it to some other clients"

NO SHIT REALLY
THAT'S EXACTLY HOW ALL CHAT SYSTEMS WORK.
But I'm glad you took the time to explain to us that Google Wave is client-server, I mean otherwise I would have thought "well the message gets carried to the other client by fucking space aliens"

>:(