My first Google Wave robot: Talk Like a Pirate!

A few days ago I published my first Google Wave robot, just for fun and getting into it. All it does is substitute your blips into pirate language -- YARRR! ;-) You can try it by adding talk-like-a-pirate@appspot.com to your wave.

An advice upfront: please don't add it to public waves without permission ... you might easily upset people by turning them into pirates! :)

Testing gadgets outside Google Wave

Here are two sites which will help you test your gadgets outside Google Wave:

• Google Wave Gadget API emulator
• Google Wave Gadget Emulator

Starting with Google Wave development

Let me just give you a short list of articles you should read and software you will need to install. This is how I started and should be enough to get you going:

• For a general overview, you should start here: Google Wave API - questions like What is Google Wave? and What is the Google Wave API? are covered here. Be sure to watch the video of the Google I/O Keynote Address, this is the demo which got us all excited. :-)
  
• Developers should head right here: Google Wave API Overview - this is where the basic concepts of Google Wave are explained. Generally speaking there are two ways to extend Google Wave: by robots -- programs which are participants of a wave -- or gadgets -- small applications which can be embedded into a wave.
• If you're thinking about developing a bot, you should read Google Wave Robots: Overview and the excellent Google Wave Robots: Java Tutorial.
  
• You will of course need to have a recent version of Eclipse installed, at least version 3.3 (Europa).
• You will need the Google Plugin for Eclipse, which allows you to upload your applications to AppEngine. See the Quick Start Guide for installation instructions.
• Wave robots are web applications and must be hosted on Google's AppEngine, for which you will need to create an account before you can upload and test your robot. Beware that you can only create a maximum of ten applications of which you can't change the name later! Every application has a unique URL, such as http://my-wave-bot.appspot.com, therefore it is a good idea to (A) think wisely when choosing a name and to (B) reserve at least one application for testing and on-going development!
• Finally you'll need to download the Google Wave API and related libraries, which you'll need to put into your WAR's lib directory. Be sure to visit the download page from time to time and update your libraries. Especially during the preview phase the API is still being changed and bugs are fixed continuously.
  

That's what it took me to get started. More on my first robot in the next post ... happy waving!

Essential developer gadgets: CodeSnippet Gadget

Harry Denholm published a useful gadget which allows you to insert code clippings into your waves with full syntax highlighting. Here's how it looks like:

I'd say that's an ideal solution to discuss code online. Here's the wave containing the installation link.

How to find a public wave

With yesterday's update Google changed the way to find public waves. You'll need to update your search queries, substituting with:public by group:public@a.gwave.com.

What might seem strange at first is actually a step into the right direction:

• Searching for public waves is more straightforward now, since with:public was basically just a hack.
  
• It looks like Google is enabling group-based waves by integrating Google Groups. It will be exciting to see where that goes.

Happy waving ...

EDIT: Apparently with:public works again. Hmmm, me no like. ;-)