Web site: incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html
Category: Network
Subcategory: Wiki
Platform: Cross-platform
License: Apache
Interface: Web-interface
Wikipedia: Google Wave
First release: May 28, 2009
Google Wave (now: Apache Wave) – an HTML 5 based web application designed to enable real-time communication and co-authoring of multimedia documents. Google Wave’s closure was announced in 2010, and the service officially closed on April 30, 2012.
It was renamed to Apache Wave when the project was adopted by the Apache Software Foundation as an incubator project in 2010.
The Wave is a document being created, along with the entire history of its creation. This history is preserved, allowing it to be replayed later. The document itself doesn’t have a strictly defined format—it’s essentially an HTML page enriched with comments, which can take the form of a standard chat, but it’s also possible to nest comments to create a tree-like structure (a response to a specific comment, not underneath).
Google Wave has developed an information exchange protocol and basic interface elements. Additional features will be available through various plug-ins and bots that users can create themselves. At the Google I/O conference, presentations included extensions that enable error autocorrection (in English), facilitate the insertion of maps from Google Maps, and automatic text translation based on Google Translate.
Wave in a Box (WIAB) is the name of the main product at the moment, which is a server that hosts and federates waves, supports extensive APIs, and provides a rich web client. This project also includes an implementation of the Wave Federation protocol, to enable federated collaboration systems (such as multiple interoperable Wave In a Box instances).
