Google Wave
Google Wave is an online software application product of Google, described as a personal communication and collaboration tool. It was first announced at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example, spelling/grammar checking, automated translation among 40 languages, and numerous other extensions. Initially released only to developers, a preview release of Google Wave was extended to 100,000 users in September 2009, each allowed to invite additional users. On the 29th of November 2009, Google accepted most requests submitted soon after the extended release of the technical preview in September 2009.
Open source
Google plans to release most of the source code as open source, allowing the public to develop its features through extensions. Google will also allow third-parties to build their own Wave services as quickly as possible (be it private or commercial) because it wants the Wave protocol to replace the e-mail protocol. Initially, Google will be the only Wave service provider, but it is hoped that, as the protocol becomes standardized and the prototype server becomes stable, other service providers will launch their own Wave services, possibly designing their own unique web-based clients as is common with many email service providers. The possibility also exists for native Wave clients to be made, as demonstrated by Google with their CLI-based console client.
Google has made an initial open-source release of some components of Wave:
- the operational transformation (OT) code,
- the underlying wave model, and
- a basic client/server prototype that uses the wave protocol
In addition, Google has provided some detail about the next phases of the open-source release:
- wave model code that is a simplified version of Google’s production code and is tied to the OT code; this code will evolve into the shared code base that Google will use and expects that others will too
- a testing and verification suite for people who want to do their own implementation (for example, for porting the code to other languages)
