Extending Wave with Robots and Gadgets

Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.

Wave extensions are a way to augment the functionality of waves and the wave client. Robots are one kind of extension Robots are applications which can be added to waves as automated wave participants. Robot extensions commonly automate tasks, but can also participate in the wave as a participant, interacting with the conversation based on their capabilities.

This hands on tutorial will walk you through the steps of building a Wave robot, from setting up the Python client library through to using the major APIs that Wave provides.

Detailed Outline

• Intro to Wave—Overview of Google Wave and it’s capabilities. The difference between Robots, Gadgets and Embedded Waves.

• Basic Application—A quick live presentation of the steps to running a simple robot. (20 minutes)

• API Installation—Get everyone with a laptop up to Python 2.5 and the latest version of the Google Wave Python Robot API

• Hello World—Copy the source and install the “Hello” robot on App Engine. Test the robot in the Wave Developer Sandbox.

• Break

• Document Change Notifications—The events that the Wave server can send to a robot and how a robot can respond.
  • Formatting

• Forms—Robots can create forms and then respond to actions taken with those forms.

• Gadgets—Some things are better done by gadgets, and together robots and gadgets are a powerful combination.
  • Introduction to Gadgets
  • Interactions between Robots and Gadgets

NOTE: Instructions and prerequisites for this tutorial may be found here.