My First Wave Bot

I finally got my Wave invite, and I immediately got interested in coding with it. I recently finished creating a bot for it that allows you to search WorldCat from inside Wave. The main servlet is in Groovy, the profile is in Java. Their tutorial pretty much works, though one of the methods was renamed:
getRobotProfileUrl() should be called getRobotProfilePageUrl() (there's a request filed to fix this). Google's plugin for Eclipse also works very well. JetBrains also has a plugin for IDEA, though I didn't test this. In their sample project SpringSource has a build script that uses AntBuilder, which I modified to use the folder structure that was already created by the Eclipse plugin. I successfully built with this and deployed the app using appcfg.cmd from the SDK. I used straight html for the bot's profile page, but in their sample SpringSource shows how you could use the MarkupBuilder in groovlets.

Anyway, the app is deployed on the Google App Engine here, it's homepage (where the sourcecode is also available) is here. You can add it to your waves by adding worldcat-bot@appspot.com. For even more bots, check out the list. Mine's listed too. There is another list out there, but it doesn't seem used as much.

Some gotchas:

1. You cannot test robots without deploying them to the Google App Engine, this makes you waste some of the number of deployments you have on the free account (currently you get 1000).
2. Wave caches its bots, so you have to change the version in appengine-web.xml (I don't think you have to change the version in capabilities.xml too unless the capabilities have also changed, but I've been changing both to match). They tell you this, but you have to be careful because even though you may have deleted the old version if you reuse a version descriptor text Wave may still try to call the old version and you will get a ServletUnavailable exception and waste another deployment. You have to wait for the re-caching to occur.
3. If you are using Groovy, you have to upload the groovy-all jar in the war/WEB-INF/lib directory (the war folder can be a different name, but that is the convention used by the Eclipse plugin).

For those who haven't heard about Wave, it's basically a kind of collaborative IM (I once jokingly described it as an MMIM - Massively Multiperson Instant Messaging). But it isn't quite accurate to describe it as a kind of IM. The text is live, you can see it as the person is typing it, but whether its treated as an IM or more like an email is fluid. It depends only on if other people are there at the same time. So, it can be viewed as a kind of mashup between email, IM, and collaborative documents and is more concurrent than traditional email. LifeHacker has some use cases, which make for good propaganda.
Anyone in the conversation (called a Wave) can edit any of the messages (blips). Side conversations can occur in the same stream, these side conversations are called wavelets. APIs exist to have bots in a conversation that automate tasks (such as links for searches, posting the conversation to a blog, bringing in text from a feed, or converting everyone's text to pirate talk) and for gadgets that let you put different kinds content inside the conversation, such as documents, polls, etc. Google plans to open source most of Wave once it's finished, allowing other 'federated' servers to become Wave providers, and they plan to make the protocol they use the predominant protocol on the internet. The Google Wave Federation Protocol is itself built off XMPP (the same protocol Jabber and GoogleTalk use). They have bindings for Python and Java currently (I've heard the Python API is not as polished as the Java one, but I don't know that for sure and I'm sure it will improve), and will probably be adding more languages in the future to support their goal of making their protocol #1. Wikipedia has a pretty good article on Wave as well.

I still have Wave invites left for my friends, if you're interested.