The high point of
presenting Google Wave at I/O? The joy of seeing crazy smart
developers react to the product and technology as we showed it publicly for the first time.
The low point? Typing
twephanie's Twitter password in clear text on the big screen
(luckily, a team member reset it before anything questionable happened!). We had the chance to
continue the Google Wave conversations through breakout sessions, which we are happy to now
make available in the Google I/O
series of videos now available online, and in office hours with the
engineering team.
Douwe Osinga
kicked off the series with a deep dive
into the
Google Wave APIs using demos and code samples to show how waves can be
embedded into other sites as well as how to extend Wave with both client- and server-side
code. After the wow of the chess gadget and the 'Rosy' robot demos during the keynote,
developers flocked to the Programming with and for Google Wave session to learn how to start
building extensions themselves. Notice how Douwe's good humor persevered through even tougher
network problems than we had in the keynote.
The next session,
Google Wave: Under the Hood, focused on core
technologies behind Google Wave, diving into the heavy lifting we did in platform design to
make it simple for developers to build concurrent applications. David Wang introduced the
technology stack behind Google Wave's real-time collaboration and concurrency controls
followed by an explanation of the operational transformation algorithms by Alex Mah. Dan
Danilatos explained how the AJAX editor renders wave content and sends and receives
fine-grained changes down to the level of keystrokes. Finally, Casey Whitelaw unveiled the
natural language processing magic behind 'Spelly' our context-sensitive spelling system.
In the third and final
session, Adam Schuck outlined the team's experience using
Google Web
Toolkit to build the Google Wave client. Adam went from GWT skeptic to zealous GWT
advocate over the course of building Google Wave. In his talk, Adam covered some recent
advances in GWT which enabled Google Wave to look and feel like a desktop application with
comparable performance. He also discussed the use of WebDriver (an automated web testing tool)
which is integral to the project's success.
We simply can't wait to see
what developers build. Check out our
docs on Google Code and
request a developer sandbox account. For technical
news and updates on the APIs and protocol, don't forget to bookmark the
Google Wave Developer Blog .
By Stephanie Hannon, Google Wave
Team
The high point of
presenting Google Wave at I/O? The joy of seeing crazy smart
developers react to the product and technology as we showed it publicly for the first time.
The low point? Typing twephanie's Twitter password in clear text on the big screen
(luckily, a team member reset it before anything questionable happened!). We had the chance to
continue the Google Wave conversations through breakout sessions, which we are happy to now
make available in the Google I/O series of videos now available online, and in office hours with the
engineering team.