Wave needs a decent client
I successfully installed a wave (google) server on a windows box a few days earlier. It was a great feeling. Here are the components that made up the server
- Open fire XMPP server
- Postgres database to be used by XFire.
- Wave related server jar which runs the server
- Wave command line client that runs the simplistic console client.
I started the console client and typed in a few commands to go through the waves. New, open, view waves were some commands that the command line console allowed you to execute. This client was a simple RI provided by google. If you would like to install a server on your own, take a look at the installation instructions.
Wave console client:
I also had the option of federating this server with wavesandbox.com but I held back. I wanted to test out the features of my wave server first. So, I went about hunting for a client. The GWT client that google showcased in its IO Dev preview was impressive. So surely they have an open source implementation of a decent wave client that can be installed somewhere ? It seems not.
I was a little disappointed with this. The best UI I could find that would integrate with a wave server was here. This was a java client with very minimal functionality. That said you have to thank the author for providing it. Its about the only decent looking client that can talk with a wave server.
There are other clients out there. One written in adobe AIR called Waver can be used as a desktop client for waves. However it only integrates with google wave, not other waves. Another one called WaveBoard also seems to target google wave and Macs. I don’t own a Mac so I could not check it out.
This seems like the need of the hour to me. A good wave client. Not a “google wave” client but a “wave client”. Adoption of the wave will be much better if we had a good client to go with it. How many times have you seen blog posts about google wave with comments that go like ‘Oh boy I wish I had a google wave invite right now’. These people need not wait for an invite. You can download and install a working wave server. If you had a cool looking client, people all around the world could be using wave right now without a google invite at all. Lack of a good wave client seems to be a bottle neck to wave usage. We need tools like Outlook / Thunderbird / <Your favorite mail client goes here> that help us access email, do the same for wave.
So how desperate are people to get google wave invites ? Invites are being auctioned off at ebay for anywhere between 1-15$ ! That is how desperate they are.(Search for ‘google wave’ in ebay) Now if only we had a cool looking client, these people could be waving away in another server much like google’s wave. May be there is a client out there right now and I am yet to find it. If you know of one, do feel free to comment. If there is none, a few programmers will have to get together and make a good looking one with all the features that the GWT google client has.
Wave invites at ebay:
Comparing wave to the telephone system. Google has released the code to create a telephone exchange, but they have kept the telephones (e.g. the GUI clients) closed. A telephone exchange is not much use to most users unless you have an acceptable client to connect to it.
Let us not forget that the server they have released does not store the Waves it creates in a permanent sense. When the server goes down, everything will be lost. So the server without a working database to preserve the data between interruptions really is something of novelty for a developer to study, but cannot be of much use to try out with users. You don’t want users to suddenly lose their content.
Give us: 1) a GUI client and 2) permanency of the wave data and then we can really conscript users to test and we can invest our time developing.
@John Poole
Yep the persistence was a pain point as well. Thanks for bringing that out. We need a server that can persist, scale and serve rich clients. Still a long way to go.