Google Wave open source next steps: "Wave in a Box"

http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-next-steps-wave-in-box.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GoogleWaveDeveloperBlog+%28Google+Wave+Developer+Blog%29

by jolie • 16 years ago

153 25 16 years ago

googlewavedev.blogspot.com

jolie• 16 years ago

Hold up, did Google just make a roundabout dick joke?

jacquesm• 16 years ago

I was very much hoping for something like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1575928 and I'm really happy they chose to open source it rather than to let it rust on a shelf somewhere.

lars5122• 16 years ago

Agreed, it would have been a great shame to let all that work go to waste. I can't help but think that the protocol will really flourish once companies can self-host, and once the entire stack is available to tinker with.

izendejas• 16 years ago

They're not letting it rust somewhere. They indicate that they plan to "extend the technology for use in other Google projects. " http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave...

jackowayed• 16 years ago

Why aren't they rewriting something similar to Wave instead of just OSSing Wave as-is? Is there secret sauce that they want to sit on for some reason?

sdp• 16 years ago

Speculation: Google Wave is implemented with heavy use of Google's internal libraries.

zitterbewegung• 16 years ago

Wasn't google wave an HTML5 app that used google web toolkit? What other libraries would there be?

Jd• 16 years ago

Not speculation. Stated by Google employees on the Protocol lists explicitly last year.

lars5122• 16 years ago

I imagine that the current codebase is tightly coupled to their internal infrastructure. They're writing the stand-alone version for the first time.

JeffJenkins• 16 years ago

I really hope this includes all of the code needed to do Operational Transforms. I've got a single user application that I'd like to make multi-user, but OT is the correct way to do it and I've been dreading implementing it. I suspect rewriting this to use my backend and frontend would probably be easier than writing that middle layer.

rubyrescue• 16 years ago

wow, just googled that. here's a great summary of Operational Transforms. http://www.codecommit.com/blog/java/understanding-and-applyi...

saikat• 16 years ago

The Operational Transform part of the wave code has been open sourced for a while as part of the open source wave-protocol. I have this link bookmarked though google code seems to be having some trouble loading it right now: http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/source/browse/#hg/src...

Also check out the wave whitepaper on OT at http://wave-protocol.googlecode.com/hg/whitepapers/operation.... The codecommit article is also really great (and probably the most helpful thing I found).

pasbesoin2• 16 years ago

Thank you!

pasbesoin2• 16 years ago

I'll take the downvotes, but HN is the best medium I have to express appreciation where I think someone from the Wave team or otherwise involved in the decision might actually see it. I just wanted to say thanks, without any further qualification.

jlees• 16 years ago

It's nice to see someone saying thanks rather than "What, is that all?". Google doesn't have to do any of this.

gfodor• 16 years ago

This is pretty impressive, or at least, shows they really have no interest in shipping this as a standalone product, not now, or ever.

It will be interesting to see if anyone can take what's there and wrap a better product around it.

elblanco• 16 years ago

It's be great if something like this became part of the expected install for a new server. Web Server, dB, scripting engine, framework, blog, Wave, etc.

fungi• 16 years ago

yay, i really like wave (aside from giving my data to google) but i really couldn't get anyone to use it with me no matter how well it fitted the project.

Also ~> http://pygowave.net/

agentultra• 16 years ago

I wish they'd done this from the beginning.

They talked about Wave being an open protocol and that anyone would be able to write Wave servers and clients. Yet when it came down to it, they released a bare-bones client implementation. All the while they continued to hack on their Wave server and adding proprietary features to their fork of the client. So it never really became as open a project as they had promised.

Day after day it became more of "just another Google project."

It was no surprise to me that interest waned. Their interface was pretty complicated, hardly anyone had accounts, and all of the data was hosted at Google instead of being spread out amongst various providers as email is (and Wave promised).

I still think Wave is a great protocol/server/client. I hope much will be done with it by the open-source community.

mark_l_watson• 16 years ago

I just blogged about this. Early this year I played around with the open source code on the Wave protocol site, but "play" is the active word here: I did nothing practical with it.

Although I never used Wave's web UI very much, I did find writing Wave robots interesting and potentially very useful.

I was disappointed when Google recently announced their phasing out support of Wave but today's announcement that they are completing the open source project to the point of its being a complete system is very good news.

Google Wave open source next steps: "Wave in a Box"

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