With the opening of the actual Google Wave preview today, I think it’s high time we re–opened the topic of the client–server (C/S) protocol.
As the FAQ for this group says: > What is the client-server protocol? > ------------------------------------------------- > The focus of our open source and protocol work at this point is on > the federation protocol, which is critical for getting inter-operable > server implementations, that is, for allowing many other people to > build Wave servers and have them interop with each other and with the > Google Wave server. We have definitely heard the requests for defining > a client-server protocol, but at this time the team doesn't have the > time to put into such an effort. > If you are interested in working on the client-server protocol we > are happy to host that discussion here, and the client-server protocol > as implemented in the open source server would be a fine place to > start. Let’s get that discussion started, shall we? Federation is great, a user preview that dumb randoms can press pretty HTML buttons on is great, but Wave (the concept) is really quite useless until somebody can install a Wave client and talk to their Wave server of choice in that client, and read waves from other Wave users writing things in their own clients through their own servers. None of that is possible until we (client developers) can get started writing our client libraries, GUI clients, web clients, and programmatic clients… and none of *those* are possible until we have a guarantee that our hard work and sweaty hours of coding will produce a product that will be useful on more than just Google’s Wave server. No offence to the Google Wave team (everything else they’ve come up with is pretty great), but the RPC/protobufs solution is… very much a non– solution, really. What, exactly, do we all want to see in this protocol? I personally am interested in seeing XMPP become not only the foundation of the federation protocol, but of the C/S protocol as well. When I first heard about Wave, before getting into the Sandbox, I was very excited; it sounded like a great idea, based on great tools (XMPP!). Unfortunately, I was extremely disappointed to find that XMPP really has nothing whatsoever to do with Wave, and I’d like to see that remedied. Really, though, any sensible protocol that we can agree on would be great. Another option is possibly something involving JSON; that’d make JavaScript heavy–clients ridiculously easy to write for the web. Please, weigh in, and let’s get this hump over with! --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Wave Protocol" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/wave-protocol?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
