Google Wave

What is Google Wave?

Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.

What is the Google Wave API?

The Google Wave API allows developers to use and enhance Google Wave through two primary types of development:

• Extensions: Build robot extensions to automate common tasks or build gadget extensions to provide a new way for users to interact
• Embed: Make your site more collaborative by dropping in a Wave

Google Wave is currently available in a developer preview as the APIs and product continue to evolve. Accounts on the developer sandbox will be given out to people intending to build with the Google Wave APIs prior to the public release.

 

The Google Wave API is an open platform allowing developers to extend the functionality of Google Wave itself, or extend other applications with waves. As a developer, you can think of Google Wave as three pieces:

• The Google Wave client application, the interface designed for users
• The Google Wave APIs, which are documented throughout this site
• The Google Wave Federation Protocol, the underlying network protocol for wave communication

This developer guide discusses the Wave APIs and how you can use them to augment Google Wave through extensions or augment third-party web applications by embedding Google Wave within them. This overview discusses the elements that make up the “waves” in the Google Wave model.

Wave Entities

Programming effectively using the Google Wave APIs requires understanding some basic wave concepts.

A wave is a threaded conversation, consisting of one or more participants (which may include both human participants and robots). The wave is a dynamic entity which contains state and stores historical information. A wave is a living thing, with participants communicating and modifying the wave in real time. A wave serves as a container for one or more wavelets defined below.

A wavelet is a threaded conversation that is spawned from a wave (including the initial conversation). Wavelets serve as the container for one or more messages, known as blips. The wavelet is the basic unit of access control for data in the wave. All participants on a wavelet have full read/write access to all of the content within the wavelet. As well, all events that occur within the Google Wave APIs operate on wavelet level or lower.

When you spawn a wavelet from within a wave, you do not inherit any access permissions from the parent wavelet. During the lifetime of a wave, you may spawn private conversations, which become separate wavelets, but are bundled together within the same “wave.” Since events occur at the wavelet level or below, the context of an event is restricted to a single wavelet. A wavelet may be created and managed with a robot as its only participant. This allows the robot to use the wavelet effectively as a private data document. These data documents are never rendered/revealed to the user and may contain structured or unstructured data about the wavelet.

A blip is the basic unit of conversation and consists of a single messages which appears on a wavelet. Blips may either be drafts or published (by clicking “Done” within the Wave client). Blips manage their content through their document, defined below. Blips may also contain other blips as children, forming a blip hierarchy. Each wavelet always consists of at least one root blip.

A document is the content attached to a blip. This document consists of XML which can be retrieved, modified or added by the API. Generally, you manage the document through convenience methods rather than through direct manipulation of the XML data structure.