on Nov 2nd, 2009Extending Google Wave
A few days ago i gave Google Wave a spin. I was already quite familiar with the conversation features and thought it was time to extend the wave by some custom functionality. I therefore created a robot extension to enrich a wave conversation with some additional functionality. The idea was to fetch details about an eclipse bugzilla bug when a bug is referenced in a wave conversation. To see how that works check out the screencast below (click the image).
The development of the robot was rather straight forward. The robot itself is deployed on the google appengine and communicates with the wave via HTTP REST calls and uses JSON as its language dialect. The communication was encapsulated in a client library which did have some bugs though. Working with the app engine was a joy i must add. Deployment and management of the application was quite cool. Fetching the bugzilla data was also easy as it is able to spill out bug details in XML format.
All in all i am very excited to see how easy it is to provide additional wave capabilities and am hopping that the wave will make its way into every days life. Also the appengine gets a thumbs up from me (at least for such simple tasks as this wave robot). You can fetch the source of the robot project here.
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I agree, the robot API makes such things really straightforward. But I find that it is quite immature at this point in time. If you check the issue tracker (http://code.google.com/p/google-wave-resources/issues/), you’ll find bugs that in some pretty basic functionality, e.g. http://code.google.com/p/google-wave-resources/issues/detail?id=373.
But it’s still an early preview so let’s see what is to come.
Hi Wolfgang
I have also experienced bugs in the client library. Although it makes writing the robots easy, it has several problems. In fact i have also found the duplicated entry messages you describe in your bug. Also the “profile” element in the is currently not evaluated by the wave infrastructure. So it is not only the client lib but also the serverside wave implementation which has some ways to go (buggy address book for example).
Cool example. Thank you!