DISQUS

chrismear · 2 months ago

The reason alternative clients aren't appearing is that no client-server API has been standardised upon and published yet. Google's original position seemed to be that somebody writing a wave server would also write a wave client to work with that server, and invent their own client-server protocol. People are calling for a standardised protocol so that wave clients can be interoperable between wave server implementations, but at the moment Google is busy on other things and is leaving the community to try and decide on something, and a lot of the discussion seems to be going round in circles at this point.

In particular, the API that the current official Google Wave web client is using hasn't been published, although someone could reverse-engineer it. There is also the robots API, which is published, but you could only use it to simulate a user with limited capabilities, so that's less from ideal. So, at the moment, there are no official ways (other than the officially-provided web client) to talk as a fully-fledged user to Google's wave server; only hacky ones.

The only other protocol that's reached even published draft stage is the server-to-server federation protocol spec. The 'reference' implementation of a simple server and client you mention is really more an 'example' implementation at this stage. For client-server operations it uses a binary wire protocol which is only documented in code and which I'm pretty certain isn't the API that is being used over HTTP by the official web client to talk to the official wave server.

So you can see, it's all a bit messy and quickly-moving at the moment, which I think is why we've not seen an explosion in alternative servers and/or clients yet.

Ian Forrester · 2 months ago

Ah thanks for that, I did look around for a client API to the server but got bogged down in documents and drafts and all types of stuff. I assumed someone would have reversed engineered the shell/terminal version into something more rich. At least it explains why there's almost no other clients at all.

Jason · 2 months ago

Looks like you can link to a wave. Doesn't the anchor specified in the URL change as you move around?

Khürt · 2 months ago

I think it mat become important once the concept can be easily understood by a non-technical person in a few minutes. I'm also waiting for the rest of humanity to show up to make it useful to me. Technophiles are not the only people with whom I communicate.

imma · 2 months ago

re: Web-Like
You can send a link to a wave (although for it to be a full link you have to include a web client that will let you view it)
eg: https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:goo...
Also the wave address is just googlewave.com!w+quBJMAUOE if you want to open it in a client of your choice (it's a keyboard shortcut help wave)

re Groupware:
I see lots of little bits of systems but nothing big and complete yet (i may be missing something) :-/

re Client:
there's a mac client in progress, see http://www.getwaveboard.com/ (via http://mashable.com/2009/10/19/waveboard/ )

- imma :-)

Ian Forrester · 2 months ago

Thanks for the comments. Groupware wise, I'd say Lotus Notes is pretty big. Web like, where's the restful urls then...