Wave accepted into the ASF incubator | Hacker News Reader

Wave accepted into the ASF incubator

apache.markmail.org

44 pointsyarapavan7 comments

while not having an army of google employees hacking on it will obviously slow down development, personally i'm much more comfortable and likely to use and rely on the tech now then when it was just another google service.

how long until we can apt-get install wave?

I'm surprised at this sentiment. Could you elaborate by any chance?

The reason for my surprise is because a significant portion of the Wave code base is geared around the user interface — which was, in many ways, the least attractive aspect of Wave (at least from the experiences of those I've spoken to). The other main parts of Wave were the various Operational Transform work — which, again, to my understanding from those who have looked at the OT framework released by Google last year, is inherently hard to scale up.

I had always assumed that these and the general market disinterest to be the reasons that Google had abandoned the Wave project — so am very keen to understand why you would be so excited... thanks!

Because it will keep the hosted google wave servers maintained and enhanced? Wave may not be very useful as a user facing web app, but I really like it as an enterprise app, makes collaboration much easier between distributed teams.

The Wave-in-a-Box interface is quite barebones. Having to hack together something different in GWT is a pain though.

The big advantage is the Federation protocol. Not only do you get OT between users, but between servers as well. You also get existing gadgets/robots functionality.

With Federation, there will be alternate Wave server implementations to choose from. I'm working with creator of lightwave to develop a very different interface:

https://code.google.com/p/lightwave/

And here are some of the UI concepts:

http://fleetinbeing.net/tensor-v1/ (miller columns for long, deeply nested waves. the top and bottom bars are totally unresolved, and will probably get cut) http://fleetinbeing.net/tensor-notes-v1/ (more intuitive inline-replies)

If anyone has suggestions, I'd love to hear 'em. I've been trawling HN for critiques of Wave's UI.

As someone who doesn't know anything about the Apache Software Incubator, what are the implications of this? What does the ASF incubator bring to the project? Resources? Credibility? Grants?

The ASF has a process for managing open source projects, that starts with new projects entering the Incubator. The project is monitored by a committee for things like how well the project is able to attract developers, whether they are able to form a common vision / roadmap. Once the project is deemed to have gained sufficient traction, it is promoted to a top-level Apache project.

tl,dr; credibility + ASF management.

what is the difference between the Wave protocol and websockets in HTML5? To me, they seem very much the same, yes?

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