Wave Federation Keeps Growing: Rich text editor is open source

As you may have heard before, the Google Wave Federation Protocol is an emerging open protocol for improving communication and collaboration across the web -- not just in a single product. To further propel the community, as part of Google I/O, we open sourced another significant chunk of Google Wave production code (now totaling more than 200,000 lines of code released), including: the in-browser rich text editor, the wave model, and the concurrency control mechanism.

This code release introduces a simple web client for FedOne, which enables you to bring up your own browser-based client running against the FedOne backend, which can then federate over to WaveSandbox.com. The web client communicates with the FedOne server using an emerging WebSocket-based client/server protocol, with the initial documentation in the whitepaper under review. There is even work going on to make an Emacs client for wave using this emerging client/server protocol. To get started with your own instance, please read a recent forum post: exploring the simple web client, and you may also be interested in reading the wave model code walk-through.

There is a growing community of wave providers building on wave technology and the Google Wave Federation Protocol, including SAP StreamWork (demo below, and you can read more about SAP StreamWork and the wave protocol), Novell Pulse (here's a demo), ProcessOne's OneWave, wave-vs.net, and AboutPeers.com. The US Navy also put out a call for proposals earlier in the year (Navy Wave RFP [PDF]). Additionally, there are several open source projects in development as well: PyGoWave, QWave, ARWave, and Ruby on Sails.

Here's a video showing SAP StreamWork federating with WaveSandbox.com:

This is all driven by the desire to let users work together no matter what system they may be using. For more information about building your own wave provider, feel free to check out the session video and slides from Google I/O 2010.

Please join us in the forum if you'd like to get involved.

Posted by J.D. Zamfirescu, and Anthony Baxter, Software Engineers, Google Wave