

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

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agentultra
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.

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jacquesm
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.

~~~
lars512
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.

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JeffJenkins
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.

~~~
saikat
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...](http://code.google.com/p/wave-
protocol/source/browse/#hg/src/org/waveprotocol/wave/model/operation)

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

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mark_l_watson
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.

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

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

~~~
Raphael
BigTable.

~~~
chewbranca
I strongly suspect BigTable is one of the primary reasons they don't want to
open source the current release seeing as they mentioned using a Mongo DB
backend.

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gfodor
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.

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elblanco
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.

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fungi
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/>

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pasbesoin
Thank you!

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

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

