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:

Things got even better today when we got our second google wave account for the same user. mmm wait… a second google wave account ? Yep. Google wave is split into googlewave.com accounts for normal end users and the wavesandbox.com accounts for developers and geeks. It is interesting to note the differences.

Googlewave:

• Is a little less buggier. It has more features like read only waves that the sandbox is missing.

• Linked to your existing gmail and docs. All your existing contacts can be… contacted.

• Has this cool green box that opens up for active wave conversations.

• No debugging or anything technically related.

• Number of invites allowed are varied. If you requested for the account yourself, you get anywhere from 8 – 22 invites (from what I have heard so far).

Wave sandbox

• Pretty buggy and is a developer’s paradise.

• Not linked to any existing accounts. You start everything afresh.

• Missing a lot of feature like read only waves.

• No invites allowed. Period At least this is true for our developer account

• Has some cool debugging features that allow you to throw exceptions / view internal logs etc.

Both accounts however allow you to deploy robots. The googlewave.com accounts are more user friendly and the wavesandbox.com accounts are more inclined to help developers write better robots. Depending on what you asked for (did you select the ‘I am a developer option?’) google gives you appropriate access to an account. And if you were wondering, no, you cannot add a friend that has a wavesandbox account into the googlewave.com waves. So which wave are you in ?

As most of you are aware by now, developers can write java robots that can aid a conversation that happens in google wave. A conversation is a wavelet and each reply in this wavelet is called a blip. There are some ‘getting started’ tutorials available out there that are of great help. These links should help you

Official google wave guide
Google wave getting started – Sort of an abridged version of the official guide written by Vogella.

Grasping the overall picture of a java robot is a little difficult. This is because there are no flow or architecture diagrams (at least none that I know of) that show you the sequence of events. Given below is a diagram that does that. Assume that you wrote a java robot that is meant to edit blips in a wavelet. The robot should provide a profanity filter service which will delete objectionable words from the wave. This is how the series of events happen.

Google wave robot sequence of events:

1. User logs in

2. Replies to a blip.

3. Our java robot is already deployed under a .appspot.com address. Its capability allows it to trigger an event that signals that a blip was created.

4. The triggered event is actually a HTTP request that goes out to the java robot servlet from google wave. The servlet then contacts wave using the wave client library API.

5. The blips in the wave are accessed using the client API. An event object return all the blips that were created.

6. The blip in question is identified and edited if needed.

7. Optionally you can include a “gadget” into your wave.  The robot can append a blip and add a gadget to it. A gadget is an XML file that houses, at times, javascript and HTML related content. The gadget can be hosted on any site. This is unlike the java robot, which at the time of this writing is only allowed to be hosted in google app engine (GAE). There are plans to allow developers to host it elsewhere on their own servers.

More on gadgets:

To get a feel for what a gadget is and how it can be used, check out the ISBN gadget and the gadget help files. Gadgets that are integrated with wave have a sense of state. This state is just a saved variable that is accessible by all users on that wave. This is like having a variable exposed to several threads at the same time. If you modify the state variables in the gadget, do so carefully since it is equivalent to accessing a non thread safe variable.

So there you go. The wave is still a developer’s playground and less of a lay man user’s tool. It will soon mature. If you happen to have a wave account, give the robots a try. Let others know what robot you made.

After a long wait I got a google wave account. yay ! Took the wave for a spin over the last few days and there were some interesting things that I observed. I wrote my first java wave robot and it was pretty cool. But an explanation of how the robot works should be left to another post all together. I will share my general observations in this post.

Deleted welcome messages:

The first thing that was weird was that welcome messages are often deleted by wave users or by bots. This is nuts. The wave welcome messages also have a lot of noise amidst them with quotes like ‘Please do not delete this !’ in bold red with a big font size. Wave still does not have a feature to disable edits. It is coming soon but it is not yet active.

Lonely waves:

Almost every one is complaining about this. They have a wave account but the 8 invites that were promised have not yet arrived (for some). The reason being that google wave is expanding its user base very slowly to avoid a massive crash of the system. It is also difficult to find waves centered around a topic. I tried to find java discussion but my searches ended up with nothing If you are a java geek and have a google wave account simply add your wave account name in the comments section. At least those reading this post will know how to contact you.

Miscellaneous / Tit bits:

• Google wave was pretty slow. But I expected that since this is a DEV preview.

• A funky sidebar was present on each window. I did not like this. I am used to clicking somewhere within the side bar’s empty space to move up or down. Fortunately the mouse wheel works with the side bar.

• Some robots are creating havoc. Editing comments left by others and deleting wave replies. This leaves some people vexed.

• There are some cool robots out there. I tried out the ISBN wave robot that replaces the ISBN number with a picture of a book and a link to O’Reilly. I can think of many applications where such robots can come in handy.

• Editing / deleting wave replies (blips) involves 2 clicks. You click a drop down and then select an option from it. Usability of the blip can be enhanced by placing small icons near each blip, which you can click to perform that action. Just a thought.

• Removing yourself from a wave discussion is not yet supported. You can add contacts without asking the contact’s permission first.

• There are wave ‘groups’ out there that discuss specific topics. You can subscribe to these wave groups. But sometimes, like in a forum thread, the discussion takes a U turn and towards the end of the discussion the participants are talking about something entirely unrelated to the root topic.

• Searching for waves is done in a variety of ways. You can search by tags / contributors / authors / wave ID / gadgets etc etc. Each wave can be tagged to particular keywords like a blog post.

This is just a tip of the ice berg. The java robot was very exciting to create and it was more exciting to watch it in action. There are some good tutorials out there that tell you how to write a bot but I see a gap where the flow of events and the overall picture of the robot is not brought out. I will try to cover that in my next post. You can subscribe to the RSS feed if you would like to keep an eye on it.

Blogger, which google acquired a while back is now ten years old. Google is celebrating the 10th anniversary by distributing presents. Its been quite a journey for blogger since its acquisition and the last ten years have seen tons and tons of blogs being added to blogger.

So as I surfed the web today, like any other good internet citizen I faithfully typed google.com into the browser address bar. Here is what I saw

Google promotes reader:

I don’t remember google promoting reader on their front page before. Google does seem to value its bloggers a lot. Google wave is set to hit the internet somewhere in the near future. It will integrate with blogs, comments, social sites etc etc, and google is already in a good position to facilitate this. Google houses a social website, a web browser – Chrome, a blogging web site – Blogger,  a feed reader – Google Reader, a document service – Google docs, a video  service – Youtube, and many more elements that make google a good competitor in the social arena. Google wave will help bind all this together. When google wave does make it live, it will be very interesting to see how it all plays out. Perhaps google will promote wave on its front page then