Google Wave, ouvert au public le 30 septembre

L’ouverture au grand public, du très attendu Google Wave, a été prévue pour le 30 septement d’après Douwe Osinga qui est en charge du développement de l’API.

Avant de présenter son projet au grand public, un certains nombres de domaines doivent encore être améliorés, et de nouvelles fonctionnalités ajoutées d’après le groupe officiel de travail de Google Wave. Pour ceux qui comprennent l’anglais, voici les fonctionnalités à améliorer d’ici là :

Extensions
Design good flow for adding extensions, which includes:

• Enabling users to easily discover extension installers
• Browsing experience for insert gadgets and robots from a gallery
• Enabling user management of their installed extensions (& easily de-install)
• Stretch goal: Expand the extension system with more hooks and actions.

The goal, in the short term, is to make it easier for a given extension to hook into conversations without being actively added to wave. For example, right now you can insert a YouTube gadget from a link to a YouTube video. We’ll open it up to let an extension trigger on a regular expression over any link, so you can build all types of
“previewers.” This mechanism will not just trigger for link annotations, but for any annotation.
Robots
- New Robots wire protocol (v0.2)
Shortly we will publish the proposed next version of the robots wire protocol. We’d love to get your feedback prior to implementing it.
– Java and Python API parity
Getting the two APIs to have feature parity
– Robot Gateway / OpenSocial RPC Access
Robots only react to events right now. By allowing the robots to authenticate themselves through the OpenSocial RPC protocol, robots can create and retrieve waves without being triggered by the wave system first, which will allow for more “active” robots.
– Better multiple wave access
Right now it is hard to create robots that keep multiple waves in sync. We’ll add support to updates waves “blindly” (i.e. without knowing for sure what their current context is) in a less dangerous way by allowing to update annotated ranges in another wave and further more make it possible to bring waves outside of the current context into context.
– Sunset the existing robots cron mechanism
After we open the Robot Gateway, the basic wave cron system will no longer be needed since robots could use Google App Engine’s native cron system or the Google App Engine Task Queue API.
– Gateway support
Improve the current tweety type of access to support outside addresses of the form address+ro…@appspot.com. These addresses will come with their own profiles and will make it possible to better support actions on behalf of external entities.
Gadgets
Full OpenSocial gadget support
While we already support the underlying gadget XML and related features, we will add full support for the OpenSocial JavaScript library (i.e. feature requires=”opensocial-0.9?) This includes a mapping of the OpenSocial concepts onto the wave concepts and supporting the actual OpenSocial APIs as well as gadgets.io.makeRequest.

– DiffOnOpen/Playback state mode for gadgets
Gagdets currently automatically support playback, but sometimes you want to be able to do something explicitly (e.g. in a chess game show the previous place of a piece). The same goes for diff-on-open. Currently gadgets only show the current state – with diff-on-open support they will be able to show the user what has changed since last time.
– Google Web Toolkit (GWT) gadgets
For complex gadgets, GWT is a rather nice way to develop. We’ll provide a library to build gadgets inside of GWT and a small framework to run the same code outside of wave to make debugging with an actual debugger possible.
Embed

• Expanded UI configuration: Switches to display toolbar, participant list, bottom tools.
• Methods to switch the wave in and out of edit mode
• Stretch goal: Read-only anonymous access so people don’t have to be logged into Google Wave to see embedded waves.

Future Thoughts
Following September 30th, we have several things in mind, but it’ll be important to see what gets built in the meantime and hear your feedback on the APIs as things evolve.
Some ideas we’re currently thinking about for later in the year:

• Expand the number of hooks extensions can plug into (via regular expressions)
• Enable robots that aren’t required to use Google App Engine
• Provide an API for robots to access attachments, search and contact
• Explore tools for improving the robot development/debug experience

Expand the embedding API to cover more use cases

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