Ever since Google presented Wave – a collaboration and communication platform – to the world during Google I/O 2009, the Internet has been a buzz with all things Google Wave.
As with every new technology, controversial use case discussions quickly dominated the technology and geek blogosphere.
Google Wave is constantly evolving. Before we start: To stay in touch I kindly ask you to follow me on Twitter (@24z).
One of the key aspects of Google Wave is its federation architecture. Much as email is distributed across hundreds of thousands of distributed servers, implementing standards as POP3, SMTP and IMAP, Google Wave servers are designed from the ground up to support federation, too.
Not only does this allow third parties, including open source initiatives, to come up with their very own implementation of Google Wave servers, it also facilitates (corporate) security, scalability, innovation and, I’m sure sometime soon, hosted offerings.
Given that federation is such a key aspect of Google Wave, it comes as no surprise, that a recent article I’ve published over at The Next Web unveiling Google’s plans to open their developer sandbox environment, quickly ended up on Techmeme’s front page.
This blog post covers my journey in getting federation between my server and the Google Wave developer sandbox to work.
It’s been a tough ride.
I’m by far not an expert on the Google Wave Federation Protocol, yet, and without the tremendous amount of support from the wave-protocol discussion group, I’d likely have failed big time.
Many aspects of Wave federation are still very beta – some folks on the wave-protocol list suggested they are even pre-alpha – so details of my findings are guessings and assumptions. Feel free to correct me where I’m wrong.
I anyway hope, this contributes a bit to the passionate Google Wave scene and hope to hear back from you.
