Google Wave - a developer's eye view Last week, Google announced Wave, a new communication tool presumptuously described as "e-mail, if it were invented today." Now, it's a coming of age for technology companies to write a collaboration tool, put a good spit-shine demo on it, and call it a revolution. The idea is nothing new. In the 80s, we called it Lotus Notes. …
How do they achieve that "what you type is what the other person sees" effect. I'll admit I've only watched the first few minutes so far but it occurs to me that each Wave instance must be polling the server for updates. I wonder how popular the wave will be with companies when they see that their bandwidth is being eaten up by all those polling messages.
But for the rest I quite like what I've seen so far. I'll have to watch the rest of the video before really making up my mind but so far it is not really a huge leap forward. I mean it is really just instant messaging that updates with each keypress and it is quite nice that you can add people to the conversation but I'm fairly sure other IM clients allow that already.
Nice thouch not using IE (still the worlds most popular browser) presumably it breaks.
IM that updates with each keypress... that's not new at all.
Polling server for updates and using DHTML techniques to update the displayed document. Sounds like standard AJAX fare.
E-mail / messaging systems that allow you to more than just view e-mails. Ooh, maybe something like calendaring and basic project management. Nope not too new either.
In the end, there's nothing new - however if it uses existing, working, technologies and integrates them better and in an easier way than previously then it ought to be a good thing.
As for Lotus Notes, Sharepoint, etc... Sharepoint is still a decade behind what was reliably possible using Lotus Notes. Shame about the mismanagement and total loss of direction that Lotus/IBM wound up with and the inevitable death of the product that followed. Not that Lotus Notes was perfect, (far from it), but it was still leaps and bounds and hugely technically superior to Sharepoint. Not that sharepoint doesn't have the occasional redeeming feature, but in essence it's little more than a badly designed, bloated and incredibly inefficient document sharing web server. It was obvious for a while that MS's marketing ploy was to kill off file sharing on the server and force everything into sharepoint instead. Luckily even MS seem to have seen the light on that one!
With luck, Google wave, being targetted at developers and not by marketing droids at marketing droids, it may work better. We'll see I suppose...
"the inevitable death of the product that followed"
Ummm, you're talking about Lotus Notes there? With version 8.5 released this year and 9 in the pipeline? The Lotus Notes that now comes bundled with IBM's version of OpenOffice (Symphony)? The Lotus Notes that is now built on Eclipse, with all the pluginableness that entails? The Lotus Notes that now has XPages for some (finally) decent web development? To mention some recent developments in a "dead" product. You mean Lotus, one of the best performing divisions in IBM?
I was pleasantly surprised to see someone giving Notes a little respect, and then choked on that line. In an article I found on The Register, you know, that tech news site that was popular back in the 90s.
"Nice thouch not using IE (still the worlds most popular browser) presumably it breaks."
please people, IE is NOT the most popular browser, it is the most populace browser. Its not favored, it is simply numerous.
mines the one with "follow me, I am jumping off a cliff" stenciled on the back.
I have watched the entire video.
Maybe I'm easily impressed. I thought it was innovative, Wave has the capability to impact significantly on collaborative working by bringing many tools together in one place. I'm still thinking about how it will be best to deploy it to gain the most benefit.
My initial concerns are based around security and that unless it is used with restraint it could easily become a bigger time drain than social media sites.
You have to learn javascript to use Wave?
Although I may be wrong here because I haven't looked at the code of the wave project. I know from the video that Wave is built 100% using GWT. If this is true and it's all open source, then I don't see why the GWT components aren't reusable as is. In which case, you could do all your Wave integration in Java not Javascript... as GWT is meant for Java developers.
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