WaveSandbox.com: Federate This | Hacker News Reader

WaveSandbox.com: Federate This

googlewavedev.blogspot.com

11 pointsgenieyclo10 comments

Since Google Wave Federation Day, there have been a number of developments:

    * The Google Wave Conversation Model Spec (draft) was published to provide more clarity to implementors of the spec
    * The FedOne client was updated to the new model spec and now displays character by character updates
    * Echoey the agent was built to help you experiment with developing your own wave provider

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Does Wave allow for the same separation between protocol and client as e-mail?

E.g., could Mozilla/Apple/Microsoft/GNOME each write a Wave client that can use Google's Wave server (or any Wave server for that matter)?

(Apologies if this is a basic question, I haven't dug through all the developer documentation as of yet...)

Yes. That's the idea. What Google has open sourced so far has been a federation backend and a text client. As far as I'm aware there is only one other graphical client interface at this time called PyGoWave I think.

From what I can tell, yes, when you run it fully federated. Like email.

I don't know about the outside parties writing Wave clients for GOOG's Wave server; I myself am just starting read the docs.

Not really. There is no standard client-server protocol; each server may use a different one.

Is there a document explaining the protocol, something such as the RFCs of the IETF?

Never mind, I found it.

http://www.waveprotocol.org/draft-protocol-specs/draft-proto...

How long does Google expect us all to keep working with them to turn Wave into what it is some day supposed to become? They've already burned through a ton of hype. Now this:

> Please keep in mind that things are early, and there will still be many changes, so your feedback is important.

That's a lot to ask of people after a hugely hyped launch. I'm starting to feel like Google will still be asking me to try out buggy previews/betas of Wave 3 years from now. I can already sense that even many in the HN crowd have stopped caring.

"Release early, release often" works for startups, but it doesn't work well for big companies who are in the spotlight. Wave is incredibly ambitious and a monumental effort. With all of these early launches, I don't think users will stick with it long enough to get it past the beta stage.

You're looking at it wrong. Think of the Google Wave group as being a startup within google.

And also remember that only a small fraction of Google users have heard of Google Wave. It only looms large in the geekosphere, where the plugged in people who look at every new thing and have an opinion about it, live. In the rest of the world it's about as interesting as Knol.

My own take is that the wave protocol is very interesting from a technical standpoint, but that it has yet to find it's audience from business/UX standpoint. And I'm glad that Google wants to fund work in this area.

I'm on Wave and it's really slow. There's this weird artificial scrollbar tab and it's 10x slower than a normal scrollbar. I hope it gets sped up a bit. Also, a native client makes more sense than chucking a ton of crap in a browser window.

Introductory docs for diving right in: http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/wiki/Installation

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