Google Wave: Up and Running

Chapter 9. Wave Federation and Additional Considerations

We’ve arrived at the last chapter of the book, after having reviewed and discussed key concepts as well as the Google Wave Client and the Google Wave APIs. My goal for this chapter is to provide an overview of the third layer of the platform, the Google Wave Federation Protocol, and to provide you with some additional information that will help you as you move forward with using and developing for Google Wave.

Google Wave Federation Protocol

Although we’ve covered Google Wave’s product and platform layers in detail, I have limited the discussion on the Google Wave Federation Protocol for several reasons. As I alluded to earlier in the book, the protocol is complex and substantial enough to merit a complete book dedicated solely to that subject. Additionally, the open source portion of the protocol is still at a very early stage, and it is subject to a multitude of changes before it is at a mature enough stage to be easily implemented by third parties.

One of the key distinctions to understand this early on is that the open source protocol is several revisions behind the protocol used in the “bundled” Google Wave platform. Currently Google has released a preliminary set of resources for the “wave protocol” that includes specifications, a prototype wave server, libraries, and documentation. These are base-level resources that can be used by enterprising developers to set up prototype wave servers that can interact with the Google ...