Google Wave Extension Updates

Over the past few months we've learned more about how extensions are used in Google Wave, and made it easier to create and install extensions. To help you build user-friendly extensions, we've prepared two new documents:

1) Google Wave Extension Design Principles

• Make it Wave-y
• Make it Easy to Use
• Make it Easy to Install
• Make it Look Good
• Make it Useful -- or Fun!

2) Extension Installers Guide

• Understand the extension manifest file
• Learn about extension hooks and actions
• Walk through installing an extension

We're looking forward to promoting extensions to users as they get access to Google Wave. If you're building extensions, please check out the above documents, and then let us know when your extension is ready.

The Extension Design Principles are perhaps more aspirational than attainable with our current, preview-quality APIs. We are working hard on making things better. For example, we are adding hooks that let robots be added automatically to the right waves at the right time, we are adding OAuth-based RPC access so robots can initiate requests to modify waves (which among other things will supercede our cron mechanism), and we are adding to gadgets the ability to display diffs when users open waves and during playback.

As always, our goal is to make it possible to write rich, collaborative applications with Google Wave that feel to users as natural as Google Wave's own features. We appreciate the vocal and detailed feedback that we have received during these first few months of our developer preview. Thank you for your patience and testing of the Wave APIs.

Happy hacking!

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager, Google Wave