NextGenApp.com

Maven Install on Mac

2011-10-14T11:23:00.000-07:00

On Mac OS X 10.6, you will likely find maven already installed.

To check:

> mvn --version

> whereis mvn

/usr/bin/mvn

> ls -l /usr/bin/mvn

lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 24 Feb 26 2010 /usr/bin/mvn -> /usr/share/maven/bin/mvn

Most likely, your mvn is linked to /usr/share/maven/bin/mvn

> ls -l /usr/share/maven

lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 23 Oct 13 18:14 /usr/share/maven -> java/apache-maven-2.2.1

However, you may want to install a particular version of maven rather than the version

Simply download maven at http://maven.apache.org/download.html

uncompress the file to get apache-maven-2.2.1 folder. place that folder inside /usr/share/java/ folder.

Remove the original /usr/share/maven link and link it to the new maven version.

> sudo rm /usr/share/maven

> sudo ln -s /usr/share/java/apache-maven-2.2.1 /usr/share/maven

To check that things are done correctly:

> ls -l /usr/share/maven

> mvn --version

Javafx 2.0

2011-07-21T13:36:00.000-07:00

Javafx 2.0 beta is released. GA is scheduled in Q3 2011.

The big change is they finally get rid of javafx script. Javafx will now uses Java as its language.
This is a welcoming change. Quoting Javafx PM in oracle: "most java developers want to use the same language to develop their UI".
Potentially, this enables developers to build web applications where frontend and backend use the same language.

Android Tablets Prediction - Android Tablets to surpass iPad

2011-04-25T19:52:00.000-07:00

Earlier last year, I predicted that Android will surpass iPhone in sales volume. The prediction was proven correct.

(http://nextgenapp.blogspot.com/2010/08/wow-android-prediction-update-my.html, http://nextgenapp.blogspot.com/2010/06/android-prediction.html)

Now, I want to put forward another prediction. Android tablets will surpass iPad sales just like Android phones surpassed iphone sales. It may take a year or two, but it will eventually happen.

The reason is simple. The combined innovation of multiple players will eventually overtake one single company. As long as Apple's iOS remains a closed system, the result will be inevitable. The history will likely repeat itself.

When I gave the prediction last year about Android will surpass iPhone, I did not think it was a difficult prediction to make. But many many people were very skeptical about that prediction. With the Android's success, I have a higher confidence level about my prediction this time and I certainly think there will be less skepticism about my prediction this time around.

Let's see how things play out.

Installing AIR Runtime on Android emulator

2011-03-06T11:03:00.000-08:00

You can find the Air Runtime.apk in Flex sdk, Flash Builder, or Flash CS5.
Then use Android's command line adb tool to install Runtime.apk. Apk files are Android package files.

On Flash Builder Burrito, the emulator Runtime.apk is at:
/sdks/4.5.0/runtimes/air/android/Emulator/Runtime.apk

On a terminal, go to android sdk platform-tools folder
> cd /platform-tools
> ./adb -e install -r

eg.
> cd /Applications/android-sdk-mac_x86/platform-tools
> ./adb -e install -r "/Applications/Adobe Flash Builder Burrito/sdks/4.5.0/runtimes/air/android/Emulator/Runtime.apk"

After installation, you can go to emulator's settings-> applications -> android applications, you should see "Adobe AIR" as one of the application.

Done.

Require Flash Builder 4 for Egit and MecurialEclipse yet?

2010-12-11T16:38:00.001-08:00

I just tried install Egit and MecurialEclipse on Flex Builder 3, but looks like it is not compatible with Flex Builder 3. I guess I'll have to upgrade to Flash Builder 4.
I believe Flex Builder 3 is based on Eclipse 3.2.

CommonTag Ontology Diagram (Semantic Web)

2010-12-01T13:54:00.000-08:00

Here is a ontology diagram of CommonTag.

Installing AIR SDK onto Flex SDK (Mac)

2010-08-05T01:09:00.000-07:00

Here is a good instructions for installing AIR SDK onto your flex builder's Flex SDK for Mac.
http://radleymarx.com/2010/02/install-air-2-osx/ (by Radley Marx)

Wow! Android Prediction Update - My Prediction Comes True!

2010-08-02T16:46:00.000-07:00

Wow, wow, wow! My prediction about Android selling more phones than iPhone has come true, much sooner than I predicted. I am wrong in how soon this will occur. It happened this quarter already!

According to Nielsen,

"In terms of subscriptions over the past month, Android has surpassed iPhone in new users, with 27 percent of smartphone subscribers going with Android compared to the iPhone’s 23 percent. "

http://phandroid.com/2010/08/02/android-edges-past-iphone-in-smartphone-subscriptions/

http://www.androidguys.com/2010/08/02/nielson-android-outsells-iphone-handsets-q2/

Solution to "Problem using as3corelib and HTTService"

2010-08-02T12:40:00.000-07:00

I encountered this error message in one of my AIR projects.

VerifyError: Error #1053: Illegal override of concurrency in mx.rpc.http.mxml.HTTPService.

It looks like the same error as the one described in:
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/681351?tstart=0

Steps to reproduce:
This occurs after I download as3corelib.swc 0.93 and put in my Flex project's libs folder. Inside my app, there is an mx:HttpService.
It looks like some sdk incompatibility.

Solution:
Instead of putting downloaded as3corelib.swc into libs folder. Copy and paste as3corelib source code into your own project. You can download the source code by using svn from http://as3corelib.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

For example, I only use JSON library. So I just need to copy com.adobe.serialization.json folder to my project.

Android Prediction Update - AdMob predicts more Android than iPhone by end of this year

2010-08-02T12:28:00.002-07:00

Admob's prediction is a lot more aggressive than my prediction. They predict more Android users than iPhone users by end of 2010.
http://venturebeat.com/2010/07/12/mobilebeat-android-users-will-surpass-iphone-users-by-end-of-2010/

Android Prediction Update - rumor, Verizon to have iPhone next year

2010-08-02T12:28:00.001-07:00

When I made a prediction, I did put in a condition. If Apple do let other carriers to carry iPhone, it may change my prediction.

Android Prediction Update - 1.7m iPhone4 in 3 days, 3m iPhone4 in 3 weeks

2010-08-02T12:28:00.000-07:00

Although news said that 1.7m iPhone4 sold in 3 days and 3m iPhone4 sold in 3 weeks, I still believe Android will eventually be able to outsell iPhone within a year, unless iPhone is open to other carriers.

Update on Android Prediction - 160000 Android Activations a day

2010-07-12T14:20:00.000-07:00

A few day after my "Android Prediction" post, where I think that there will be at least one quarter where Android outsells iPhone (in one year), Google said there are 160000 Android activations a day. More data point to support my prediction. I couldn't ask for a better timing in that announcements. :)

source:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/23/160000-android-phones-sold-per-day/

Creating more secure swf app

2010-06-24T15:28:00.000-07:00

This is a good article on creating more secure swf app
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/secure_swf_apps.html

If your primary focus is on making the data secure in transit, then you should read the "encrypting data" section. That is how I found this article. I had a need to encrypt data in transit.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/secure_swf_apps_12.html

Hope it helps.

Android Prediction

2010-06-19T20:18:00.001-07:00

The tipping point of Android and iPhone is coming very soon.

When I say tipping point, I mean when Android will outsell iPhone (not the total devices in the market, but the number of devices sold in that quarter) in one quarter in US. This tipping point should come very quickly barring Apple pulling something drastic (like opening up iPhone to carriers other than AT&T)

Since early 2009, I have believed that Android will eventually surpass iPhone. That belief has not changed.

The combined innovation of multiple players will eventually overtake one single company. As long as Apple's iPhone remain a closed system, the result will be inevitable. The history will likely repeat itself.

Let's look at the PDA market in the past. At the time that Palm has 90% market share, I believed that Windows Mobile (at the time called PocketPC) will eventually overtake Palm. It may take a long while, and it did take several years. But Microsoft eventually was able to overtake Palm in PDA area.

However, I cannot say that my belief at that time is correct, at that time, I based my belief on gut feeling alone. However, looking back, it appears that several signs were already present at that time that partially foretell such outcome.

It seems that when a new thing is introduced to consumers, it must be very simple to use for it to catch on. Palm was a master of that. However, as time goes on, people demanded more choices, options, and functionalities. aThat is where the combined industry ecosystem comes in that can overtake a single company. In another word, smart phone market would have been as vibrant if it wasn't for Apple's iPhone. iPhone is a superb devices to convert users to smart phone users, but it also opens the door for the users to accept other smart phones. And that is where Android can excel eventually.

App stores - mobile, flash, and beyond

2010-05-26T08:58:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the appstores.

Adobe Marketplace
Flash platform promotion service
Android Market - for Google Android phones
Chrome Web Store - appstore for web app - for Google Chrome Browser
Sun Java App Store
Intel AppUp Center - for netbooks and atom cpu devices
Windows Market Place for Mobile
BlackBerry App World
Nokia Ovi Store
Palm Pre WebOS App Store
iPhone Appstore

AIR 3.2 SDK upgrade error: error while loading initial content

2010-05-26T01:40:00.000-07:00

I run into the same error, thanks to dancashman.com for solution.
http://blog.dancashman.com/?p=30

Need to update the AIR descriptor file's xml namespace.

Summary:

Update your descriptor file namespace (yourApplication-app.xml)

New Value:
<application xmlns=”http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.5” >

Tip: Flex with https require the web page to be https too

2010-05-01T09:50:00.000-07:00

Just a quick tip.

Flex can make SSL call by simply specify "https" in the url of HTTPService. However, the enclosing page must be in https for this to work. Otherwise, you may get "Security Sandbox Violation" like the one below:

*** Security Sandbox Violation ***

Connection to https://graph.facebook.com/me/friends?access_token=xyz halted - not permitted from http://localhost:8888/xyz/xyz.swf

Facebook f8 announcements: Graph api, OpenGraph protocol, and plugins

2010-04-22T01:11:00.000-07:00

Today's Facebook F8 conference has 3 major announcements

1. Plugins for 3rd-party websites
2. Graph API
3. OpenGraph protocol

1. plugins for 3rd-party websites

This includes:
Activity stream plugin – allows other website to add Facebook “news feed” to their site
Social bar plugin – allows other website to add barlet at bottom of their site. Chat included.javascript:void(0)
Like plugin – allows other website to add Facebook “Like” button
Login plugin – can show which of your friends have login to this site.
Recommendation plugin

2. Graph API

Facebook have overhauled their api. The so-called "Graph" api is now the way for apps to access all api.

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api

3. OpenGraph protocol
This requires some explanation.

OpenGraph protocol specifies a set of structured meta data that can be more easily understood and categorized by machines. Once a 3rd-party website embed these data, it allows facebook to include the site and these data as part of the Facebook OpenGraph.

Eg. IMDB website can use OpenGraph protocol to describe a movie object

<html xmlns:og="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/"
      xmlns:fb="http://developers.facebook.com/schema/">
   <head>
   <title>The Rock (1996)</title>
   <meta property="og:title" content="The Rock" />
     <meta property="og:type" content="movie" />
     <meta property="og:url" content="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/ "/>
     <meta property="og:image" content="http://ia.media-imdb.com/rock.jpg" />
    ...
   </head>
  ...
</html>

When this is included, Facebook can store this site as an object in the OpenGraph. And that object will have these properties: title="The Rock", type="movie", url="...", image="...".

How is OpenGraph significant?

If facebook's vision of opengraph succeed, they could be the connector of the web!

In terms of the flexibility and coverage, what facebook wants to do with OpenGraph may seem like a baby step comparing to what Semantic Web wants to do. Facebook only define a small set of predefined meta data. While semantic web have various powerful ontologies already defined. However, with facebook's reach and appeal, facebook might finally get a lot of website owners to embed structured metadata, which would be a significant milestone for semantic web in any case. This may turn out to be a giant leap for semantic web.

Apple should not limit the language used by developers

2010-04-22T00:34:00.000-07:00

Many people were pretty upset about Apple's decision two weeks ago to ban users from using other programming language to develop iPhone app. All I can say is that I did not remember Microsoft banning developers from using other languages to develop on Windows. Apple seems to be worse than Microsoft in this case.

Event: FLEX 4 Launch Tour and Livecycle Code Night

2010-04-01T01:08:00.000-07:00

FLEX 4 Launch Tour and Livecycle Code Night

Thursday April 1st

6:30 Pizza, 7pm Meeting

Data binding in Flex

2009-12-30T22:03:00.001-08:00

Data binding (usually done using {} in mxml) is one of the best features in Flex. It simplifies a lot of coding. Underneath the hood, Flex actually generates a lot of code to handle the data binding.

Note:

You can skip the rest of this article and just read Chapter 40 of the Flex Developer Guide.

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/devguide_flex3.pdf

The easiest way to do data binding is {} in mxml. It is so easy to use and so easy to understand that it is like magic. However, one often has questions about what can or cannot be put into the {}. Object properties (eg. object1.abc) are definitely allowed. Chains like object1.subobj.subsubobj.subsubsubobj.property are also allowed. Is functions allowed? Is array allowed? The best source is chapter 40 of the Flex Developer Guide.

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/devguide_flex3.pdf

To debug {} bindings, see Debugging bindings section in andybryant's blog:

http://dodgybits.org/2009/04/12/flex-data-binding-pitfalls/

Data binding can be done in many ways:

{} in mxml
<mx:Binding> tag in mxml
BindingUtils class
ChangeWatcher class
good old event listener

More confirmation that Wave App Store is coming

2009-10-29T08:03:00.001-07:00

During the one-day Google Wave hackathon at Googleplex in July, Lars Resmussen gave a short speech and mentioned that there will be a wave app store. It appears that this is reiterated during the London Wave hackathon. This is a good news for developers.

http://thenextweb.com/appetite/2009/10/27/google-wave-app-store/

Google Wave Preview invite released

2009-09-30T23:33:00.000-07:00

Google has released invites to Google Wave Preview. Many people, including me, has received the invites. According to Google, they will continue release invite in batches over the next 24 hours.

Google Wave limited beta release tomorrow 9/30

2009-09-29T18:40:00.000-07:00

Google will give an limited beta release (100,000 people) on 9/30 to public. :) If you sign up on http://wave.google.com a long time ago, you might get the invitation tomorrow.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/surfs-up-wednesday-google-wave-update.html

Flex and Flash Integration

2009-08-24T09:04:00.000-07:00

I had come across a few quick and sweet Flex and Flash integration tutorials done by Adobe evangelist Serge Jespers . It covers how to build a component in CS4 and use it in Flex. It also covers create a swc in Flex and use in CS4.

http://www.webkitchen.be/2008/12/12/video-tutorial-make-flex-components-with-flash-cs4/

http://www.webkitchen.be/2008/05/05/the-flash-and-flex-marriage/

http://www.webkitchen.be/2009/03/09/video-tutorial-use-flex-for-your-actionscript-coding-for-flash-cs4/

a couple blog posts about wave

2009-08-15T13:30:00.001-07:00

Here are a couple blog posts from gtug campout members.

Peter Huboi gave a few ideas on how wave can be used for music industry. http://marketingplaylistpower.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/how-will-google-wave-impact-online-music/

Paul Böhm talks about what wave is. The important point, as he points out, is that wave's potential goes wells beyond the current wave UI. Evaluating wave based on current UI is selling short of its potential.

http://lolstartups.com/post/159309953/wave-is-the-new-x-windows

The GTUG campout hackathon was so fun.

2009-08-12T22:56:00.000-07:00

It was such fun, I had a blast. Details later.

google-wave-api group activity level is up

2009-08-05T14:02:00.000-07:00

Right after wave is announced, I remember google-wave-api having more than 100 emails a day. After a while, the email volumn went way down, presumably because people who receive wave sandbox account have moved the discussion to wave-discuss@wavesandbox.com. Since last week, I have noticed that the volumn is up again. This is a good sign. This may be due to arrival of new sandbox accounts. Or it may be the due to shutdown of wave-discuss@wavesandbox.com.

Wave related events

2009-08-04T14:39:00.000-07:00

Google development blog listed a number of events in addition to the SV Bay Area events listed in this blog a few days ago.

http://nextgenapp.blogspot.com/2009/08/this-week-should-be-called-google-wave.html

http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-wave-community-events.html

http://code.google.com/events/calendar/

Wave AppStore?

2009-08-03T11:47:00.001-07:00

How many of you out there would like to see Google creating a wave appstore (or wave marketplace, whatever the name is)? If so, please leave a comment here.

This week should be called Google Wave Week in Silicon Valley

2009-08-02T15:44:00.001-07:00

Well, it was not really an official thing, but there are enough exciting Wave events in Silicon Valley to make every wave enthusiasts abuzz with the nice tinkling feeling. :)

1. First of all, Bay Area Wave Meetup

time: Monday, 2009/08/03

organizer/contact: Lawrence Wong

http://www.meetup.com/bagwmg/calendar/10872339/

Topic: Presentation by Jochen Bekmann on wave federation. Jochen is a part of Sydney's Google Wave team.

2. Google Technology User Group on Wave

Time: Wednesday, 2009/08/05

organizer/contact: Van Riper

http://www.meetup.com/sv-gtug/calendar/10853983/

Topic: wave extensions

3. Then the crown jewel: 3 day GTUG (Google Technology User Group) campout

Time: Friday, 2009/08/07-2009/08/09 Organizer/contact: Van Riper

http://gtug-campout-sv.eventbrite.com/

This is a 3 day hackathon focus on wave or other Google technology.

Nice...

Wave on Palm Pre

2009-08-02T15:37:00.000-07:00

I was playing with my friend's Palm Pre and thought I will try to see if wave website works on Pre. and viola! It works.

Pre loads the standard desktop browser wave website. When I login, I saw the standard 3 columns layout, same as the layout seen on desktop browser. When I login using iPhone's browser, it only shows the inbox column (clicking on it will show the message column).

Here is the screenshot.

Wave Federation Day session notes

2009-07-22T20:18:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the tireless dedication of those people who took the notes, those of us who did not attend Wave Federation Day can get some information.

If you have a wave sandbox account, you can see the original version here:

https://wave.google.com/a/wavesandbox.com/#restored:nav,restored:contact,restored:digest,restored:wave:wavesandbox.com!w%252BfieoAKhX%2525A.1

If you do not have a wave sandbox account, the notes are copy & pasted here:

---------------------------

It's important everyone agree on the operational transformation (OT) algorithm.

Waves consist of Wavelets

Wavelets have participants

Wavelets have XML documents and annotations

The different wavelets in a wave can have different participants (so parts of the wavelet are private to some groups of users)

changes are operations

operations can be composedCaptain

http://waveprotocol.org

Download source from:

http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/source/checkout checkout via mercurial

Google Wave Federation Architecture - Soren Lassen

What's in today's open source release

org.waveprotocol.wave.model

operational transformation (OT)

operations, documents

org.waveprotocol.wave.protocol

protobuf definitions for signing, hashing, internal use

org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone

end-to-end prototype

wave server, wave client, federation port spec

some security and other gaps filled

XMPP mapping refinements

What's missing from today's release

not a reference impl

no persistent storage

crude indexing

no concern for performance, redundancy, scaling

simplistic client

no private replies

no client-side OT, no optimistic UI (get new state from svr )

crude ACLs

no groups

no attachments

simple expensive crypto signing

no Merkle-tree bundles

Q&A (after lunch & Soren's talk )

Is the protocol locked down?

The protocol is a moving target

What is an IQ stanza?

Soren: What you pass in XMPP, these fragments of XML called stanzas, comes from XMPP standards.

Do you have some kind of prioritized list of things that need to be done and a way for developers to indicate interest?

Dan: No. - Good idea and Dan would capture this in a wave.

Do you forsee any policy management at the protocol level?

Soren: The protocol draft will eventually be locked into standards org(?) when it reaches that stage.

Dan: Different providers will have to have different policies for rejection, etc. of operations

How will the XML be compressed and bit rate managed?

Soren: Total bit rates shouldn't be too scary. We don't think it is a present concern. Don't have answers in that area.

Is there anything in the protocol that can accept some notion of "throttling" ? I don't want to accept it at this rate or I don't want to accept a particular operation.

You could ignore messages and force a resend, and the resend might start bundling things.

Are we planning to support any proprietary authentication schemes? (clarification from audience: suppose you run your own server and want to auth through your own LDAP, etc... )

Allen: No, nothing like that exists in the planned prototype implementation. Dan: We provide Open ID. That would flow through. Allen: Help your self with the open code. Dan: bring your reqs to the protocol group.

Where is the XML specified that actually stores the document itself?

Soren: Should be easy to reverse engineer what the XML looks like. We should display this. We will provide specs for this.

Are there standards you are expecting to incorporate? Or are you looking to refine that? Something like RFC822

Allen: No. Waves have a different format than email. We want to accomidate different formats, but need your help to do so

HTML 5? Soren: the representation used has to be amenible to OT

If I do go about creating my own wave server, how can I get gadgets to work?

Dan: All the types of the APIs are very important to the wave experience. We will need to figure out a way to have the API layer be standarized across wave providers. Something like OpenSocial. Robots are a newer piece. The wire protocol for instance is not published anywhere right now. Embed is a more basic Javascript API. I hope it will be easy to stanardize this as well.

Will we open source the server-client?

Dan: Yes, the "lion's share" but will take awhile

Can you speak to Google's committment to wave? is Google comitted? How can we know?

Dan: Yes, we are rolling this out to 100K users starting Sept. 30

Gmail?

Dan: Email isn't disappearing anytime soon

Will we be publishing things about Google's DB layer?

Soren: We are hoping to do this. You will find in the most recent white paper on attachments there are some details about how things are stored. Most important thing is that we use BigTable, megastore and other google proprietary tools, but we need to make it work w/ storage tools that work outside of our instances.

There are certain operations that exist in our Wave sandbox but were removed from released code?

Soren: Not everything was working correctly so we removed some things. A lot of operations were added as we need them. Lots of questions: who generates ids for waves and wavelets? Clients are equipped w/ unique id generators. The first operation you do on a document, that creates the document if it is not already there.

You could have two wave servers one of which rejects a change from another. What happens? Isn't there a forking problem?

Dan: The wave is mastered on a particular wave provider. Not asking for an ack, but a command (from master to other server). Still some things which need to be worked out.

:: Pause to fix mikes ::

Soren: We try to maintain some user experience principles in our client. One is that you can't take a wave from someone else. We have a 'remove participant' at the protocol layer. One thing that can happen here is that someone removes and the other person did not want to lose that content, and we want that the person removed can keep their content and history and create a fork, but we will probably need a tweak in the protocol to support this.

Dan: This sort of already happens w/ private replies. In the UI this is represented as a...

What is no-op used for? Who would it take to combine add and remove participant operations into a single operation?

Soren: We've thought about this a lot. No-op is used for "Debug" (from Dan), a bit obscure, modify w/o creating new Wave. Can add/remove an arbitrary number of participations, would be nice to have one operation . We don't know?

Mutate document is complex operation, has this property. You can combine an arbitrary number of mutations into a single mutation.

Soren: yes, this has some interesting mathmeatical properties

Is there a process for distinguishing capabilites for different types of waves? Esp. for chatrooms and blogs if you can't modify them.

Allen: Two kinds of process which spring to mind. Conversational document w/ permissions in wuch a way that inserting replies into a blog is not allowed because it is not suport

Follow up question missed

There is going to be some kind of access control.

Dan: We kind of looked at that as commenter mode. You can't change things that were added by other

Soren: we should pride ourselves that there are no quesitons about the security protocol.

What sort of scalability has come up so far and do we expect to use things like BigTable?

Soren: Yes, things have come up and yest we expect to use things like BigTable. Storage is one place where you need to... We'd love to talk more about it but I guess we haven't come around to a white paper on that yet. Too big a question. Come talk to me.

Will the reference implementation have persistance?

Dan: We will need to work w/ people who have exp. with massive perstistent data storage that doesn't use BigTable.

Hadoop is out there. XSpace. Postgres...

How often do you send operations assuming that the client and server respond immediately?

Soren: As soon as the window clears, we made a couple of modifications in the OT protocol compared to what the OT supports, we can get around to some things that OT has to solve. Another thing we do that , another thing we do is that everything has to converge between each delta instance. What we do, manage outbound traffic, put it on the wire. If you have a lot ot say.

Backed up client can send bulk operations?

Soren: Yes, this is a side-effect you get. These will generally be bundled nicely together.

Is that the server does the same as client?

Soren: Might be some element because we use TCP conections, if

Dan: Def. room for optimization improvements (response to unheard question)

Apache?

Soren: Google hasn't its own server. Right now plain TCP.

Dan: FedOne prototype, completely independent of Google software, running it on some machines that aren't near data centers.

Missed

is Google going to hand out certificates for everybody or can we get our own certificates?

Lea: We don't plan to be the folks, but we need to have some standardization. What system we would use is up for debate. We are not handing them out, no.

What ports will Google Wave be using and will it be compatible w/ servers running over XMPP (Jabber, etc.) ?

Soren: Prototype uses only standard component protocol, and extensions. This means it uses the same port as XMPP for now.

But most people accept that when you are running on the same prot that you would implement more of XMPP than just the core.

We are not sure that this will be a problem but need to discuss it more. XMPP folks will be here later if they aren't here already and we have a seperate session on that.

Do we need to standarize wire protocol used by robots to the robot gateway? I think this is necessary.

Soren: This is not so clear cut necessarily. We have a Robot API.

But the API is. .. ?

Soren: We should probably standardize both protocols/APis.

When we start to bake in ACLs into the Client will this be via operation lists or pre-defined Roles? If Roles can you inject other Roles from another server?

Dan: We are still thinking about the moderation aspects. Wave is still a very open system. We touched earlier on the commenter role. In terms of injecting roles, I go back to Master-Slave, will be up to the person who owns wave what roles are available and which can be asked for.

Question about the Federation and white paper documentation, mention of 'globally agreed order'? Who controls this and makes sure it is unique? The order that operations are applied to the wavelet.

Specified in OT doc (?) + Crypto-magic fairy dust

Clarified that the globally agreed order is up to the server that started the wave and owns it.

Is it reasonable to expect that Google client will work with anybody elses server? Is it your expectaation that people who build servers will also necessairly take on teh burden of building their own clients?

Dan: Will be evolution. When first go out will talk to each other. We will need to standarize the Server-Client layer, but this will take a lot more time, when we do you can use a stanardized client.

Aleln: We would love to standarize the Client-Server ptoocol. We can't do yet, but we will decide what order to do things in based on feed back in the API/Protocol Groups.

When you converge towards the state that the server also converges towards, you may take different steps than the server takes and for the play back do you use the server states or client states?

We use the server states on playback, we deal w/ clients that are always online, therefore you would not normally perceive a big difference. You want consistant to gloss over. What comes out on the end preserves all fof the transformations. It is clear that there may be situations where.

Dan: There are some situations where this can be confusing.

It is important form a lot of perspectives to esp. in clients as it relates to when things happen. We need to think about time date stanmpign avarious operational transformation and how that gets played back? We need to play strict attention to ordering of operations

Danan: Every wave is owned by a wave server and time stamp comes from that server.

I think that will be a problem. They have time stamps, I have something, you have something, no one knows what time stamp is ? FRCP, Fed, regulation, Orgs, have to maintain copies of org. records, you need to be able to play back things, need to be auditable.

Dan; I agree.

audience member: print everything out

Dan: I am open to continuing questions

If you have a "commneter" mode where ir doesn't do character by character OT, (like a chat room_) how much extra capacity can I sqeeze out?

Allen: Complicated question. Costs come from sending things out to Robots indexing, indexing, . Yes, it looks like there are savings there, but we can'ts ay how mcuh

Soren: Operational Transformation has to be cheap. It is really fast.

Dan: Very core to the experience. If there are various levels of compliance...

Another security question: To the extent that this is an extension of email can also be an extension of abuse. Do you see anything rising up that could be the emergent abuse (such as phishing) ? Abuse use cases... Have you ever lost a night of sleep for a system which does robots or do you sleep very soundly?

we are going to have an abuse breakout session

Lea: We are thinking very careful about Robots. All kinds of ways to abuse things. Also very interesting ways in which you can limit abuse. And able to automatically rewind abuse. Really cool system. really cool possiblities.

::Justin deletes message from Lea. then adds it back to demonstrate possiblities of abuse::

dan: Our role is to help people understand. We use it as a tool internally quite a bit. And we have learned a lot about wave etiquette. Interesting to evolve models as Wave itself has evolved.d (2) 6K developers in, 20K to work in over next month. Sept. 30 we plan to get this out to real live users.

Soren: We have the Imaginative power to do these things . All about gadgets and robots and making things work on top of this platform. Pretty fascinating user engines, based exactly on OT which allows an optimistic client user interface. Every day we look at our client and come up with interesting things which it enables, things you can do in the browser that are better than you can do in non-browser applications.

Dan: The benefit to Google is that web-based collaborative applications make the Web stronger which also benefits us (Google).

Can a particular wave provider transfer ownership of that wave to another wave provider?

Dan: Not in the protocol at this point. Ob. some sort of graceful degradation needs to happen there. If you have other wave providers, you can have an election system.

Soren; Forking away is probably the simplist solution.

If you do what to run your own web server what kind of sizing, security issues will you have?

Allen: So are dealing w/ that ourselves.

Can you share some data? For instance, how many users can you support on a single server?

Allen: I'm not comfortable sharing the numbers we have, and these numbers will change.

Dan: This is also very difficult to map to non-google architecture.

I have a question for the audience: Is there a scheme for distributing a wave across multiple servers? seems that presence/state is pretty coupled in the server right now. bueller?

and I mean not in the client/server federation sense, but distributing load for a single wave.

Dan: I totally agree. We should keep things as distributed as possible.

How do we decide when to create new blips vs. new wavelet? If I hit reply looks like the client is creating new wavelet.

Soren; It is not a new wavelet. It is a blip(?). A private reply would be a new wavelet.

How are comments annotated? How do you know if something a comment?(inline reply)

Soren: This is not in the protocol. That is all things that we want to express in the HTML.

You have been using Wave internally for quite awhile now. How does it affect the work you do?

Dan: It is great that other people can fix your typos (yes! comment by typist Joel). We have an information overload problem we are working through.

Allen: Great to send something out to the team and something that will increase if there is interest, very easy to get a document/idea out there and get comments.

Google client doesn't do any transformation, everything goes to the server. At some point people will want to do editors that work offline. At that point, when the change sets come through it will look different in different places. The OT process aims to get the same result for different changes submitted in a different order. How do you handle offline Wave access?

Soren: With regard to the first question, we want as few lines as code as possible in the prototype, so we chose to make it a thin, dumb client that doesn't do OT. But the one we use when you disconnect you can keep on editing and keeping on editing, and keep convergent and it is all syncronized. The one thing we don't have a the moment we cannot persist the state on the client. If you close the browser it is gone. We think that OT is a wonderful vehicle to get that done.

Will the ability to proxy and cache for non-master wave servers be included to the protocol?

Dan: This is already built in. ::turns to Soren::

Soren: This is the expectation. The wave server will cache things. It stores it for you.

Dan: You have the option to cache them how you chose.

::Break::

Security Panel

Primary typist: Casey ( tring to keep up, Lea talks quickly)

Participants: Ben, Dirk, Lea.

Communication Model

data privacy

multi hops

No one other than the intended recipients should be able to read data.

want SSL on every hop! not always legally feasibly

Data Integrity

attribution :& integrity

Signing Strawmen

PKI every delta - public key signature on every change: VERY expensive, 1-5 ms pr delta

Symmetric key MACS on each delta. token on every delta

if you can verify you can also sign

so anyone on a wavelet can forebgv messages from everyone else

at best the hosting server cld forge messages from everyone ( MIM )

so: Bundling

we want PK sigs and efficency per delta

how? share sigs over multiple deltas

based on merkle hash trees, so we can remove parts of the tree

...

Winnowing - sign bundle and winnow it down ( pictures and hand gestures )

History hash

need to ensure that data is deleted

cumulative hashing of all operations give unique ID to each operation

also ensures that operations cannot be droped from servers view ( dectable)

Signature Data Structure ( code slide )

ProtocolSignedDelta, ProtocolSignature, ProtocolSignerInfo : http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/source/browse/src/org/waveprotocol/wave/protocol/common.proto

message ProtocolSignedDelta {

required ProtocolWaveletDelta delta = 1;

repeated ProtocolSignature signature = 2;

}

message ProtocolSignature {

enum SignatureAlgorithm {

SHA1_RSA = 1;

}

required bytes signatureBytes = 1;

required bytes signerId = 2;

required SignatureAlgorithm signatureAlgorithm = 3;

}

message ProtocolSignerInfo {

enum HashAlgorithm {

SHA256 = 1;

SHA512 = 2;

}

required HashAlgorithm hashAlgorithm = 1;

required string domain = 2;

repeated bytes certificate = 3;

}

Certificates

Openfire (or jabberd, etc.) uses its own certs

Wave server also uses certs for signing of deltas

FedOne implemenetation expects:

Private key PKCS#8-PEM

signer cert X509 (DER or PEM)

intermediate certs

... as files ( command line options)

you can get free certs from xmpp.net

if U use self signes certs fed peers wont eaccept your deltas unlss they run with --waveserver__disable__verification

this is different from crossfire, which will work with self signed certs through dialback

FedOne impl will by default trust JDK-provided CA;s, plus the XMPP ca

self-signed certs are in the example to make it easy. in the production federated network, self-signed certs will be turned off

QA session

[[I'll do the answer you do the questions, k?]][[OK]]. Okay, looks like you are doing the answers I do the questions :) oops! :)

[[ I htink this question was about federation trust chains>]]

Lea: so we had this discussion about doing this, in particular a lot of us are intereste din encryptino, but we;re not looking at doing this at the federation level, but at a higher level - this wavelet is encrypted here is the key. a lotof these are matters of end user trust - we've been doing a lot of thinking about it but don't have any answers yet.

Google should really think about how people can rachet it up and performance balance it.

this is an interesting topic and we're not quite at that level yet

If I have a federation for healthcaAPA?

Lea: it;s been a while since I looked at HIPAA, I actually think is interesting about using wave in the healthcare context, which we;re not at yet, is because of HIPAA auditing and you're federated in health care providing you're essentially signing al lthis "stuff." this would be an intersting application - health care, but it's really hard due to the nesting documettings

federating with yourself sounds like it would make auditing easier

Otherwise it could be a great applicatoin fore the healthcare industry, doctors could exchange images, could cinlude identifable (& private data) ?

I'm working on a summer project and building an open-source porject on top of Google-Health. How cawill the secuirty of the project work with Google health?

Lea: Google Health API and Data? so right now it does not. we're very paranoid. the two systems do not talk to each other. google health has to wait until this is more complete.

No work around for that right now?

"google is not hooking up wave and google health"

This whole problem is a hairball, almost unbounded. Can be a risk that you give people a false sense of security, where gaping holes remain unaddressed. My question is: how much of this do you expect to get done before you release the server and reference servers What security things are gating factors for releasing reference implemenation? Generally speaking, is there anything that is preventing the release of a reference implementation?

Lea: if you can think of security stuff we haven't address tell us!

Soren: things like ACL are not up to snuff, we'll be coming to you guys ( securyt group) to talk about requirements. we're in a fairly good state for the reference implementation .. [[ I didn't get that well ]]

If you put some measures of security here, like ACLs, this raises my expectations of how things will work...

Leay the point it must sound like we are saying that we're going to have security, and yet we're going to say "Buyer beware " and all that - but we're saying that because we don't believe that we can have anything useful w/out security. there are a lot of people out there with a lot of free time and who want more money. we're aware that we need to do security but tellus if you see us missing something

Is there any way to trace all our certificates, is there any way I can trace all of that information? If I have several servers, but one is known to be not secure. I will not allow a wave to display that information. is there anything in the protocol to allow the interrogation of those servers?

lea: at the security layer we are saying that we can say who is talking to us, and there has been th ought about saying ": you're a bad server and throwing out a lot of abuse" but... but that's going to be talked about in the following Abuse session.

Is there going to be any standardization of the client server interface as far as security goes? T

Lea: there are a huge number of aspects... not sure what... you are asking?

it is up to the individual wave providers to decide what they are going to do. corporations will do their own SSO, we're not going to dictate as far as other implementations are concerned.

Supportability could be, what kind of support for Single-sign on..

guy: as far as federation protocols is concerend we stop at the federated server level.

At this point your are not contemplating any way to cross-authenticate users at all?

guy: no

Basic problem is that anyone who knows my address can send me sh*t, how are you planning to address that?

they will cover that in the abuse section, but you will know who sent what due to authn, so you would be blocking the individual users andshutting them down. or you may decide you don't trust all servers. exactly how that happens will be up to the individual servers. [[?]]

Just in looking at the sort of facebook-social-network model, any message you receive, more open than this...

more like email in the exp that anyone can send you a message, but there will be something to determine say that someone has communicated with you before they will get easier access

Is there a concept of a sub-domain? If I am running multiple wave servers w/in my organizaiton for example? Can you have an internal domain?

sure the whole l point is that the originating server is always identified by its signatures.

Can you talk a little bit about user provisioning? We have a compnay w/ 8000 people we want to start waving. How do we get our users in bulk on to the system?

well if its your own server it's up to you, we're not dictating provisioning details , we're saying that once you have done that you send a message to identify the super and the message is signed identifing the server

Do you guys envision any sort of network of what is a trusted server?

lea: right back to the Abuse seminar: we will not bless your server, WE are going to say Hey youare sending us spam which makes us sad. we hope ppl will get together and decide,say, not to talk to server Alice because it's spending a lot of spam.

Is there a notion of email BCC in wave?

Lea: i don't think it's built in right now, there has been a lot of discussion about related concepts,

o you can make a copy of a wave and replace the body of the message so its kind of the same thing

Is that through an alias? Putting it in a different group?

::positive gurnt: [huh?]

When you copy a group you get a static?

when you copy a wave you get a static thing and you can put other people on it but they won't see the live updates on the originating wave

Any control where you cannot forward, print, etc. a wave?

the ACL model isn't worked out, right? there are practical limititainos to some of these suggestions like "no printing this message"

There was someone who mentioned a button where this can be circumvented, where no one new can be added? An off the record feature. This gives a measure of comfort for people who want to talk off-the-record.

lea: so yes, I think that it is an interesting issue which we haven't worked out yet, we want to see conversation about this, what we want it to look like.

The way I understand right now. I can access everybody in the directory? There is no kind of hiding right now? I change whether or not someone can see my presence?

Lea: what is the latest version of the directory?? yes we do know that seeing presence is controversial, we thinkt here will be measures about hiding that, it's not going to be magically available to everyone.the idea is that your presence will have to have that approved by somebody

[whew] [Great job Casey, you had the difficult part!] ha thanks I'm dizzy from typing. [I'm going to create a new wave for commenting on the presentation, sound good? That will help us organize potential contributors.] [ one wave for logging the Q&A, another for the presentation]?

Allen: Slides will be published, but will take a little while

FedOne demo

The rest of the demo code was pushed and it reports to build ( applause )

http://tr.im/FedOne

lightweight impl, fed gateway, text client which you may of seen at Google

we can't cover all the detail right now

demoing 3 clients, 2 in one domain, other in another

sitting on 2 machines in oregon, opeking the ports now or soon and so you should be able to run aginst them. they will be upfor the next few months. if you have patches / contrib use the email list that some of you may of heard of the wave protocol group.

OK, those XMPP servers on the backend support component extension, OpenFire,

as soon as you add a person from the other server the actions are pushed across

[[ DEMO with multiple terminal windows with really big fonts]]

presenter starts a conversation with anthony, an inbox with all the waves ( in ASCII ). All these waves are in-memory, feel free to write a persistance impl. presenter goes on to add anthony via terminal interface.

on other projection we see java lanucning client from cmd line... anthony replies in text client.

present adds sam at other wave server

[[ lots of logging flies by in another projector. lots of key exchanges fly by, etc. ]]

presenter: hmm.

presenter: er, it was working 2 minuites before , but this room knows what it's like (laughter)

they get it to work after a client restart [[ I think? ]] applause

Q: what is the point of this? people typing in text windows?

A: it's really an experiment and a place for integrators and developers to kick tires.

A2: we may check this on a regular basis to respond. A3: we could write a robot to talk back to you guys as you connect from your clients/servers.

[[ whiteboard is added to array of presentation technologies ]]

presenters go over the stack: federation host, wave server, client front end and federation remote in one process. client front end talks to text clients via a not-the-real protocol ( this protocol is intended to be an example). hosts and remote talk XMPP into OpenFire.

Q: there is a mess of XMPP talking at OSCON this week? are you guys there are what? A: yes we are ( their OSCON reps walk in, applause )

Q: will you be keeping these in sync?

A: yes that is a goal, there will be a cmd line option for setting the protocol version as thing leapfrog/get out of sync.

Q: is the protocol spec up to date

A: it's a static snapshot and it'sl not yet refresed ( as of this time ) A2: it's in HG, the most recent one.

Q: is the client server spec in here? A: no it is not

[[ missed question ]]

A: there is an apache java project for XMPP impl, but it's nowhere near working we looked at it for a week. Openfire can be just used

At this point there is a split of activities: a discussion of span and abuse in one area,

and hacking / discussing the FedOne release in the other.

(spare bulltes for chasing) (ammunition)

Google release source for a crude wave server-client example

2009-07-22T20:11:00.000-07:00

On Wave Federation Day on July 21, Google has released source code for a crude wave server-client example for learning purpose. This is more an example so developers can use to learn the protocol, it is not even a reference implementation yet. Nevertheless, it is exciting. Source code can be downloaded at: http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/source/checkout

Google Wave Java Robot API now opensourced

2009-07-22T19:44:00.000-07:00

Early on, Google has announced the intention to open source Java Robot API. Now it has finally arrived.

http://code.google.com/p/wave-robot-java-client/

The google code project has existed for sometime, but it only contain documentation before. Now it also has the source code. :)

Wave Collaborative Editing

2009-07-21T01:43:00.000-07:00

I experienced something incredible when many attendees (William, Hitesh, etc and me) are doing the collaborative note-taking. It is quite a sight to see multiple users editing at the same time. It is even better when I realize that I will have a note that is 10x better and I can concentrate more on listening rather than busy note-taking. The power of collaborative editing through wave is a tsunami in terms of its magnitude.

Imagine this in classroom: every class session will have a wave, multiple students will perfect the notes.

Imagine this in conference.

Imagine this in a meeting for meeting minute.

Wave API Hackathon (Silicon Valley) Demos

2009-07-20T21:37:00.001-07:00

Here is the demos of the Wave Hackathon that occurred in Googleplex. Thanks to Alan (aka Captain Al) of Google for creating the writeup.

If you have wave sandbox account, you can view Captain Al's (geez, it just sounds cool) writeup at this wave: https://wave.google.com/a/wavesandbox.com/#restored:nav,restored:contact,restored:digest:hackathon-720%2540wavesandbox.com,restored:wave:wavesandbox.com!w%252B1ryRLbxG%2525A

For those people who do not have wave sandbox account, the writeup is copy&pasted here:

Demo line-up:

Concurrent-safe gadgets (by Avital Oliver)

Gadget URL: http://thewe.net/safecounter/safecounter.xml

What is does: Here's a gadget that accurately counts how many clicks it has had (even if two people click at the same time). Everyone modifies a separate key.

How: Each click generates a new random key. Values are Javascript expressions that encode the operations necessary to calculate the sum.

Gadget uses eval.

Comment that running arbitrary expressions via eval has security implications which can be solved

A robot (which didn't work during the demo) can read the bloated gadget state and "normalize" it by eval'ing all of the expressions and replacing them with one expression that represents the combination of them all. (Written using Rhino, a Java implementation of Javascript based on Mozilla) - POC at thewe-wave@appspot.com, invite after adding gadget for now

A Good Robot: Wave Defender (by Kabriel & Frank)

Robot Address: wave-defender@appspot.com

Allows users to stop "bad" or unauthorised changes to their waves.

Intended for automatic forum-style moderation

Can complain, but don't yet know how to roll-back. (Kabriel: Please come talk to Alan)

Can be configured with specially formatted text in wavelet body, but it would be nice to be able to create a control channel (in the form private reply with an embedded GUI) when the robot is added.

Q: Is the source for this robot available?

A: If we can get it to work in a reasonable way it could be open sourced. However it is currently not useful.

ActionScript Library (by Sung Wu)

Library URL: http://code.google.com/p/wave-as-client

Photo browser gadget URL: http://wave-as-client.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/example/wave_photo_browser/web/wave_photo_browser.xml

Button counter gadget URL: http://wave-as-client.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/example/button_counter/web/button-counter.xml

What: Flash gadgets using ActionScript & OpenSource ActionScript Library

Why: Users can include this library and not touch JavaScript, only using Actionscript for their gadget

Coolness: demo of image gallery from Google I/O - two users see other users navigating

Confybot (by the Ribbit team)

Matt Taylor (mat.taylor@ribbit.com) & Kevin Gillett (kevin.gillett@ribbit.com)

To get into the Ribbit REST beta email Mat and Kevin

URL: http://www.ribbit.com

What: makes conference calls by dialing every number listed in the wave

Uses Ribbit service for transcription

Can fetch MP3s into the wave (it works!)

Can fetch transcriptions into the wave too! woo!

See www.ribbit.com for APIs (OAuth, REST based, currently in private beta)

Calendar Gadget (by Elizabeth)

Allows embedding a public google calendar as a gadget in a wave

Because of limitations of the google calender embed api's it is read only

Twiliobot / Clackpoint (by Evan and Kyle)

click-to-call in wave

twilio bot finds all the phone numbers in a wave and inserts a form-element call button.

Call button -> inserts gadget into wave, collects your number

Appends transcript of phone conversation to wave.

First bot-transcription

Later human-transcription

Then MP3

I think we should get Dominoes to call Pizza Hut.

we'll get an MP3 of the ensuing chaos.

And another Gadget!

clackpoint: audio chat gadget

Free RESTful api.

RickRolley (by David Byttow)

rickrolley@appspot.com

Try it yourself!lf!

System requirements: sound card, speakers, and no taste for music

AmaWave - a variation of AmaTwit (by Kevin Marks)

You're talking about something and you realize you want to refer to a book.

Type the name of a book in such a book: and it will make a hyperlink to Amazon

amatwit.com

Waverly - Breaking News Bot

Wikipedia (Tom)

wikystuff@appspot.com

When you add wikystuff, it puts your wave content into the Wiki

Wave helps with:

concurrent editing

WYSIWYG

spelling (with spelly)

Wave Hackathon sessions note

2009-07-20T13:38:00.000-07:00

Wave Hackathon in Bay Area today, Thanks to William and many other people (sorry, I do not know all the names) who took the notes during the session, there is a very nice session minutes. I really enjoy the collaborative editing that was happening on the real-time.

If you have a wave sandbox account, you can read the minutes here: https://wave.google.com/a/wavesandbox.com/#minimized:nav,minimized:contact,minimized:digest,restored:wave:wavesandbox.com!w%252Bj_uTmtvg%2525C.1

For those who do not have wave sandbox account, here is the notes taking by William and many others.

Wave Hackathon - live from Googleplex.

Agenda can be found here

Wave minutes:

Message from Lars (someone check that spelling):

100 thousand beta users by

Highlight extensions by Sept 30

Looking for more ambitious extensions and usage

Make extensions feel right, flow properly.

Building a gallery like experience to find extensions.

Application store planned, monetize extensions (no more info at this time)

David Byttow on Wave API

(Are the slides available somewhere?)

Wave intro (why build on Google wave?)

Real time communication.

Workflow focused on bridging with communication

Business opportunities

Why are we here?

Windows success? From developers

Developers key to long term success

Wave:

Exciting technology

solve problems in workflow

Increases productivity

life to static pages

foundation with vast range

Embedding

Place a wave on a web page.

Transparent: can even embed wave without looking like wave.

Done via javascript

Rethemeable

change color, styling, etc

have full access to wave

respond to events on wave

Made in Java or Python, on Google App Engine

This is temporary, will be opened up later

In development: Ruby API, PHP, perl coming.

q: when gadget broadcast state, can robot get event?

a: yes. robot have more authority than gadget.

Demo of Smiley robot: replaced ":)" and ":(" with unicode chars

Called "yasr": yet another smiley robot

Demo of Swedish Chef (borkforceone@appspot.com)

Monty

Robot to execute python code.

set wave.result to function output, monty makes a blip.

ideas:

Addie (calculator)

Facty (fact checking bot)

Spammy (spam deleter)

Arnie (terminates other bots)

Publishy (publish content to external db)

Maily (email integration)

Extensions (new)

Shrink wrap your gadgets and robots!

Extend client with third party apps

Richer experience

Share and deploy apps

(Using)

Debug-> Extensions->Add extension installer

Insert via xml url.

Puzzle , can be put in a wave and sent to others.

Install button.

<<<>>>

API

XML based

Hooks (listeners)

New wave

Toolbar menus

(not implemented yet)

Keyboard shortcuts

Macros

regular expressions

Actions

Insert gadget

Add participant

Create new wave

Apply annotation

Q: do extensions survive in the embedded UI?

Roadmap

Extentions

Java robot API (open source http://code.google.com/p/wave-robot-java-client)

Python robot api updated!

java api more advanced, google has updated python api to be closer now.

Markup XHTML supported in blips

APPEND_MARKUP operation

Extentions

Read only anonymous access (stretch goal)

pending scalability issues

Extend UI configuration

Display toolbar, participant list, inbox, ...

More styling options

Gadgets

UI improvements

dropdown menu on hover

speed up rendering

right now, there is a 1-2s delay before it renders

OpenSocial support

retrieve friends, etc

DiffOnOpen/Playback states

GWT-based gadgets

Robots

New wire protocol (v0.2)

JSON based, see python code (?)

Will be published later for feedback

Bring parity to Java+Python APIs

Internal speed improvement for AppEngine robots

Robot gateway, OpenSocial REST access

Robot access to OAUTH controlled resources

Multiple wave access

Sunset (get rid of) robot CRON, in favor of direct access to wave servers w/ authentication

Gateway support: improve the current "tweety" type of access to support outside addresses of the form "address+robot@appspot.com"

Extensions

Enable users to easily discover extension installers

Directory of gadgets/robots/extensions

Extention Marketplace

Enable user management of their installed extensions (uninstaller)

Expand API from feedback

Marcel Prasetya (mprasetya@google.com) marcel@wavesandbox.com - Robot Details

Robots

read/write wave content in which it participates

General classes

content assist, completey, smiley

data synchronization: buggy, tweety

multi-wave applications: polly, blogbot

conversational: eliza

Currently, robots only run on AppEngine

@appspot.com

Architecture

Client->Wave server->linky

Client->Wave server->spelly

Client->Wave server->Robot proxy->(JSON HTTP)->robot

Events

Wavelet self added

Blip submitted

Document changed

...

Operations

Wavelet append blip

wavelet set title

document insert/delete

...

View objects

Wave is xml doc with text and non-text content

Abstraction layer:

Text View

Form View

Gadget view

Demo: tweetz robot: simplified demo of tweety

no login form, uses hard-coded uname/pass

fetches tweets on wavelet_self_added

submit tweet on blip_submitted

Build a robot (using java):

Get app id (appengine.google.com)

download client library

Devel using eclipse w/ google appengine plugin

Eclipse project "web application" type

Place libraries in lib/ directory of project

import them into project workspace (might need to refresh project after adding libs, before import)

Create config file: /_wave/capabilities.xml

defines events to trigger

Extend class on AbstractRobotServlet

override processEvents(RobotMessageBundle) func

Create a new blip: bundle.getWavelet().appendBlip().getDocument().append("Hello, world!");

Getting blips: for(Event e : bundle.getBlipSubmitedEvents()) {

extention.xml: Defines extentions, such as UI plugins.

Deploy the robot to App Engine

Click eclipse AppEngine icon from google eclipse plugin

Q&A

Talk about moderation, whose in charge. Who's in control?

Moderation ability, control a wave.

Comment only mode.

Still thinking about it.

Built initially completely open to get it working, easily can add moderation later

From protocol point of view, who's in charge, moderation

Still very early, see wave protocol forum to give feedback on it

Will talk about it tomorrow on federation day

How handle spam?

Allen: Won't allow spam on wave. ( mass laughter at this point )

Expect to always have some level of abuse.

Noone can add you to a wave without them being in your address book.

Content analysis.

All waves are signed at a provider level.

Some discussion on user level signing, long term.

Again, ask in federation forum

Problem of others editing your waves

Possible solutions

specify "no bots"

Not sure yet

Grainular control?

Only stuff available right now is what the client can do.

Possible to do with robots.

Concurrency issues with gadgets?

Two clients click a button to increment a value, last person to click wins

Planned support for number operations (increment, ..), key/value operations

Currently, only text based operations (replace, append, ...)

Situation with connection limit (proxy->frontend)

No limits on front end?

DOS protections

User opens several [waves/pages of waves] on an account, runs out of connections?

2 channels per page

...No idea...

Robot works with 1 wave. What about robots that can use multiple waves. Robot act on a user's behalf

User might authenticate a robot as themself, do work on all player waves.

will have OpenSocial REST & RPC

will have oauth

Want control over what robots can do to own waves, or on behalf of you

Multiple angles for permissions

"Settings" wave, overall robot interaction

Control, and turn off extentions via setty

concept: "do not use spelly on wave that matches a seach"

Minimum bitrate required

Right now: pretty hight

Not tuned yet

Work on mobile client will improve desktop client as well

Gadget performance

RPCs: very fast, POST message

Loading gadget: initial iframe load issue, 1-2 seconds

Speed being worked on

reason is iframe loading from 3rd party or gmodule

Forwarding waves

Add someone to a wave

Copy wave to a new wave

<...>

More control permission to owner

Removing participants feature does not exist. (also, robot cannot remove people right now)

Concern of someone adding too many robots, too many blips

No robot limit

Yes. (it is a concern)

"Who are you waving with, do you trust them"

Long term: control over the wave. Who can add what (block new participants from adding more)

There is a rate limit. Spammy robots get blacklisted if they go insane.

Robots are passive, a crashed robot will not affect anything (aside from the lack of a robot)

Given a thousand-robot wave, don't open that wave.

Enough APIs to create your own wave client (related: running own wave server)

Yes, of course

Still working on it

Ask on federation day.

Currently: only can embed a wave

Later: embed other components

Participant limit?

Cannot handle too many "yet"

Talking about solutions

Will need to be a hard limit

Again, discuss on wave protocol forum

Mobile client, supported now?

Existing client built using GWT

slowly being worked on in background

not a priority right now

Can a gadget talk directly to a robot?

Gadget updates state, robot responds to it

(external?) request: call robot directly (not a good choice, storage and playback bypassed)

Send message directly to robot

<..>

Working on more moderation abilities

"Commenter" role important: people can only comment, cant edit original.

Looking at use cases before implementing

How to implement a group, group level access?

Group functionality is limited right now

Working to expand it

Groupy the bot exists, written at a prior hackathon

Location based blips (standalone, not added by gadget)?

Interesting idea

HTML5 has gps/location API?

Announce something when near something?

Mail integration?

Yep, write a mail gateway

Tough problem.

Enough API internally right now

No time before launch

Talk to waveteam if you want to make one.

Access wave client with XMPP client?

Ask at federation protocol

Google Voice integration?

Nothing announced

interesting use cases

Robot protocol, simple protocol

JSON

proprietary from Google

fast, compact

Developers use client interface? (???)

Dont think so

implementation detail

Google wave server open source?

Working to make it open source

Will take time to disentangle it from google production stuff

"Tomorrow [federation day] will be very exciting"

White paper? Implementation documentation? Internal timelines?

Question for tomorrow

Robots running on other 3 servers (?)

Different client interface

"It's your wave server"

Robot is mechanism to update content of wave xml

Up to the client how to render a robot.

Robot APIs "should" be made similar

Cirtifying robots/extentions

Nothing to announce right now.

Sept 30: adding real live users

View the backing xml to render a wave in the client?

Robots don't have access right now

Will be opened up later.

Right now: a way to look at wave content for debugging

hotkey or something, combo of 3 keys

dont remember the combo

Used to back up the content?

Sure.

Robot to backup the data, snapshot of xml

no way to get it "back in" to the wave

If build a client: 2 ways of backend. Bypass editor, or use editor. API to editor?

For google editor: working on modularizing it. Would love to open source it.

Very complex

Nothing to announce right now.

Super important

Haven't had time to open source client.

(Let the hacking begin!)

Requires sandbox account during dev preview

Q: we have to login to wave account first before we browse to the site with wave?

Account will not be required for viewing

Ideas:

Embed on site

Chess

Wave CMS

Gadgets

Features

Real time updates

participant support

state management

revision history

playback

Google Gadget Editor

http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/docs/legacy/gs.html#GGE

Public Location:

Google App Engine

websites

Adding gadget to wave

Debug menu: Debug->Extentions->Add Gadget, paste url in.

Toolbar menu

Robots API - robot can add gadget

Tips

Automatic height adjustment

requires feature: dynamic-height

Calls to gadgets.window.adjustHeight()

(see docs)

Safari 3 gadget flaky right now

Use FireFox 3, or Safari 4

try not to visualize changes before state changes are reflected on the client

Dont submit deltas, render on state change

Develop with playback in mind

Ideas

tic-tac-toe

server-authoritative chess (robots + gadgets)

Collaborative TODO list

whiteboard

embedded browser (collaborative surfing)

Robots

Robotic Butlers :)

Architecture

Client->Server->Robot Proxy->(JSON HTTP)->Robot on App Engine

Robots are participants, can do anything a user can do.

Google Technology Campout

2009-07-20T08:27:00.000-07:00

If you are in mood of some hacking in early August, Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group (SV-GTUG) is hosting a Googe Technology Campout for hacking on Google technologies. More specifically, topics will be focused on Wave and AppEngine for this particular campout. Have fun.

You can read more about it here: http://www.meetup.com/sv-gtug/pages/GTUG_Campout:_Silicon_Valley/

Wave API Hackathon Day & Wave Federation Day July 20 & 21

2009-07-20T08:23:00.000-07:00

Google is hosting two days of Wave hacking and knowledge fun:

Wave API Hackathon Day: July 20

Wave Federation Day: July 21

Locations is Google Headquarter in Mountain View

See Google blog for more details: http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-wave-hackathon-and-federation.html

Tonight's Google Wave Meetup presented by David Byttow

2009-07-13T23:11:00.000-07:00

David Byttow presented Wave API in tonight's Bay Area Google Wave Meetup. Here are some of the notes I wrote down.

In the beginning of today’s session, David goes through embed, gadget, and robot API. Then he went into something new and exciting: Zombies (I know... it is not really not great a name). Zombies are robots running on the client-side, most likely inside the gadgets.

Zombies

- robots running on the client

- client-side sandbox environment

- allows gadgets to have robots-like api

example uses:

- syntax highlighting

- auto-correction and formatting

- client ui modification

Zombies is an internal name, it may not be released under this name. Several people in the meetup suggested the name Implant instead of Zombies as they feel that is a more accurate description.

Change non-Eclipse SVN project to Android Eclipse project

2009-07-12T11:04:00.000-07:00

Some Android project on svn may not be an Eclipse project. To get the convenience of ADT, we may wish to transform them to Android Eclipse project. The following are the steps:

Preparation:

Make sure you have the following plugins installed:

- Android plugins for Eclipse

- Subclipse

We assume that you have already configured Eclipse for Android development.

(The following description and screenshots comes from Eclipse Ganymede version).

import from svn by doing the usual file->new->other->check out project from svn
select "check out as a project configured using new project wizard"
select android project
find out the package name and the class that extends Activity class and enter in the info. eg.
create the project.
You may see a build error caused by conflicting R.java. Under src directory, there is a R.java, which conflicts with the R.java generated by Android project under gen directory. Delete R.java under src directory. (You may wish to do a diff of the two files first).
clean and rebuild and make sure there is no error.

Hope it helps.

Notes from Seth Covitz's talk on Wave at Google Technology User Group

2009-07-01T21:42:00.000-07:00

Some notes from Seth Covitz's Wave talk tonight.

Documents are used for content (blips) and data (data documents)
Documents contains xml and annotations
Annotation can specify range. Avoiding xml’s nesting problem
Documents are stored as a series of deltas
Delta is xml format too.
Different clients will have to take the documents and render it the same way.
Even if operations are applied in different order, they will still result in same data (operational transformation research)

For wave gadgets:

You may not want to update the gadget ui when user interact with it, you should just generate a state change, then wait for the state callback to change ui.

Seth demoed a +1 gadget. He also demoed a wave gadget being embedded on igoogle using embed API.

Wave is indexed in realtime. There is indexer watching change and update index for your search.

Hook extensions

Extending the google wave client

Keyboard action, etc

Robot architecture

too concentrated on listening. Didn't copy things down.

Wave client-server protocol

2009-06-26T13:49:00.000-07:00

There were some discussion about client-server protocol at wave office hour.

On waveprotocol.org, there is a white paper about wave client-server protocol. http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/internal-client-server-protocol

However, the white paper is a high level view of what the protocol should look like, it does not yet specify what the protocol should look like.

I think client-server protocol may be important to help people who build other server and client to maintain compatibility. This is especially important for desktop client. If email protocol was not standardized, Outlook and Thunderbird email client may only talk to only certain email servers. Hopefully, a client-server protocol standard may emerge.

Flex Builder 4 Beta is out

2009-06-26T13:44:00.000-07:00

Flex Builder 4 beta is out for at least a week now. I like Flex Builder 4 more than Flash Builder 4. I wish they have kept the original name. In the enterprise world, it is much better in the enterprise world to call it Flex than Flash... http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashbuilder4/

Google launches Wave sample Gallery

2009-06-23T20:59:00.000-07:00

nice! http://wave-samples-gallery.appspot.com

Presented Wave Actionscript API at first Bay Area Google Wave meetup

2009-06-17T22:20:00.000-07:00

Last Monday was the first Bay Area Google Wave meetup. I have presented the wave-as-client (the first Wave Actionscript Library) with a photo browser demo. When one party scroll to a different photo, the other party's photo browser will scroll to that photo too. :) Hopefully people enjoy the demo.

Google Wave and Race Condition

2009-06-15T14:01:00.000-07:00

Character-level protocol

Google wave is the new platform for real-time communication that allows both parties to edit the same wavlet (you can think of wavelet as conversation or document). If you are a software developer, you might be thinking about how Wave is going to deal with race condition. I just found a good video from a Google engineer David Wang that might help clarify how wave can avoid race condition on protocol level when both sides are transmitting changes. Bascially, the protocol will specify the changes at the character level.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ykZYKCK7AM

Race condition on Wave Gadget

That said, it seems that Wave Gadget may run into race condition.

If one participant write "gamestate"=1 into wave gadget state and the other party write "gamestate"=5. Then whoever writes later will overwrite the other's change.

To make it more concrete:

Let's say that both party check state to see if a host for the game is selected. If not, claim to be host and save it to state.

party1 calls wave.getState() to and sees that "gamehost" property is absent. So gamehost is not selected.
party2 calls wave.getState() to and sees that "gamehost" property is absent. So gamehost is not selected.
party1 go ahead and claim to be gamehost and write the state "gamehost=party1" (by calling wave.getState().submitDelta())
party2 go ahead and claim to be gamehost and write the state "gamehost=party2"
Now both side think they are the host. Whoever writes last will overwrite the other side's state.

Hopefully there will be better control about race condition in Wave Gadget later.

First Bay Area Google Wave Meetup Tonight

2009-06-15T13:54:00.000-07:00

Lawrence Wong has organized a new Google Wave Meetup for Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay Area. If you are interested in Wave and you are local to this meetup, you should come check this out.

http://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-Google-Wave-Meetup-Group/calendar/10528233/

Google Wave Actionscript API - v0.3 asDoc posted

2009-06-08T23:12:00.000-07:00

Posted v0.3's asDoc at this location:

http://wave-as-client.googlecode.com/files/wave-as-client-doc03.zip

Google Wave Actionscript API - v0.3 released

2009-06-08T23:11:00.000-07:00

Implemented wave.getParticipants() and wave.getParticipantById().

All methods are implemented.

Downloaded the source code and swc at http://code.google.com/p/wave-as-client/downloads/list

asDoc with Flex Builder

2009-06-08T16:52:00.000-07:00

Martin Rädlinger has a good article about how to setup asDoc right from Eclipse or Flex Builder. The instruction works great. The only thing you have to be careful is that the arguments should be "-window-tile" instead of "- window-title" (look at the screenshot that shows the argument and you'll understand what I mean).

http://blog.formatlos.de/2008/07/10/asdoc-with-eclipse/

iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre units sold

2009-06-08T14:44:00.000-07:00

Here are a few items found from the Internet about how many units was sold for each of the 3 phones.

Stat as of 2009/06/08

	Number of units	Number of apps
iPhone	40million (June 2009, before new iphone launches. It will surely increases after new iPhone launches.) 1^st generation: 146k sold in first weekend 3g version: 1m sold in first weekend	50000 (June 2009)
Android	1m g1 sold on t-mobile in Mar or Apr 09 according to one blog (approximately 5 or 6 months after launch). According to another blog, 1m g1 is sold in 71 days (faster than 1^st generation iphone)
Palm pre	Estimate 50k sold in first weekend (June 8, 2009)	n/a

Source: Iphone and Palm Pre figures: MG Siegler http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/08/40-million-iphones-and-ipod-touches-and-50000-apps/

Source: android data:

http://www.googleandblog.com/android-phones-million-sold-faster-than-iphone/3564/

http://www.androidcentral.com/t-mobile-g1-hits-million-units-sold

Google Wave Actionscript API - v0.2 out

2009-06-07T00:55:00.000-07:00

Most of the major functionalities are working. It is tested on Wave developer sandbox. Yes, I get the sandbox access. :)

Google Wave Actionscript API - status update

2009-06-06T09:29:00.000-07:00

Most of the major functionalities should work. Will fix a couple more issue on Sunday.

The code can be downloaded at http://code.google.com/p/wave-as-client/source/checkout

Google Wave Actionscript API

2009-06-04T20:33:00.000-07:00

I have started creating an Actionscript library for Google Wave Gadget API. If everything goes as planned, one should be able to create gadgets that contain wave-enabled Flex/Flash using this library.

It is hosted at http://code.google.com/p/wave-as-client

It is not yet in any type of working version as it is not tested.

Google Wave API Introduction

2009-06-02T18:10:00.000-07:00

What type of things you can do beyond the standard Wave:
Developers can use the Wave API to extend the functionalities. Wave API allow us to implement new application that runs on Wave server (ie. Robot api), or client-side application that runs within a wave (ie. Gadget api). It also allows external website to add Wave functionalities to their site (ie. Embed api).
3 types of Wave API
Robot
Gadget
Embed
Robot
Robot api allows developer to build an automated program that fills the role of a Wave participant.
API Language: Java, Python
The example of what this api can do include:
Translation robot: robot that automatically translates the text.
Link robot: robot that automatically change the typed link into a hyperlink.

Gadget
Gadgets are client-side program that can be run inside a wave. Wave itself is a gadget container.
API language: javascript
example: putting a voting gadget within the conversation to allow people to vote on a particular choice.

Embed
Embed api allows another web site to embed Wave on it. Right now, this is still quite limited. It basically contains an iframe where you can place a WavePanel in it. Then the website can add participant, add reply, or load an existing conversation.
API language: javascript

Google Wave Introduction

2009-06-02T18:01:00.000-07:00

Google Wave is a new communication and collaboration tool.

It is a

Platform - opensource product that enterprise can host themselves
Protocol
API
Hosted service

Watch this video and be amazed.