Google Wave public preview: a new age for collaborative research

Update 10-1-2009: I have a public wave embeded. I cannot make wave communcation work between different domains (googlewave.com – wavesandbox.com).

To embed Google Wave, the code is different from to embed wavesandbox Wave. I modified my code a little. It might not been the most clean one, because I am using fauxML plugin. For me, it is the most easy one. Right now, I have a filter named gwave to embed Google Wave, and another filter named wavesandbox to embed wavesandbox Wave.

The trick is to find the waveid for Google Wave. It was easy for Wave in wavesandbox, because I can directly get it from the debug menu, which doesn’t exist in Google Wave. To get the waveid, you need to find it from the URL. Here is an example:

In the browser, I saw this

https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252B8FXBasN4C.1

The waveid is googlewave.com!w+8FXBasN4C
It is boring to change

%252B

into +, and delete anything behind the last .
So, I use str_replace and substr to do it.
Now, what I need is just using

Of course, if you want to be precise and enter the exact waveid after gwave tag, the filter still works and no alarm …
Enjoy!

wp_add_faux_ml( 'gwave', 'wp_gwave_faux_ml' );
function wp_gwave_faux_ml( $src ) {
	$srctag = str_replace("-","a",substr($src,18,8));
	$src = str_replace("!w%252B","!w+",$src);
	$src = substr($src,0,26);
	$obj = '<script src="http://wave-api.appspot.com/public/embed.js" type="text/javascript"></script><script type="text/javascript">function initialize'.$srctag.'() { var wavePanel = new WavePanel("http://wave.google.com/wave/"); wavePanel.loadWave("'.$src.'"); wavePanel.init(document.getElementById("waveframe'.$srctag.'")); }</script><div id="waveframe'.$srctag.'" style="width: 480px; height: 640px"></div><script type="text/javascript">initialize'.$srctag.'();</script>
';
	return $obj;
}

I have been testing the wavesandbox for a while now. It is developer preview, but very very promising.

To learn basic ideas behind Google Wave, please check my Google IO post here. The youtube video below is long, but really worth the time to look through.

watch at youtube.com

I have tried to install the Federation Protocol on my own server – just like setup an email server – instead, it is an open-source Wave server.

I am a blogger, and I want to embed Wave easily into my blog post. Here is how. Of course, there are many solutions on the Internet which are doing the similar thing.

Today, Google Wave starts its public preview!

Cameron Neylon wrote two posts (I, II) back in June about what scientists can do with Wave. Cameron focused on two issues: publishing a paper and recording an experiment. I summary several points as following:

Naturally the inline commenting and collaborative authoring tools get a good workout and it is possible to watch the evolution of specific sections with the playback tool

“Reffy” – for adding formated reference

Terminology checkers can be run over the document, based on the existing Spelly extension

A chart/graphing widget is added to the document and formats the data into a default graph which the user can then modify as they wish. The link back to the live data is of course maintained.

The published document is then a living thing. The canonical “as published” version is clearly marked but the functionality for comments or updates or complete revisions is built in.

We set up the experiment by including the instrument as a participant in the wave. This participant is a Robot which fronts a web service that can speak to the data repository for the instrument.

This sample can be directly referenced via a URL that points at the wavelet itself making the sample a full member of the semantic web of objects.

Once everyone is happy the Robot will populate the table with additional metadata captured as part of the instrumental process, create a new wavelet (creating a new addressable object) and drop in the data in the default format.

When we’ve finished the experiment we can aggregate the data by dragging and dropping the final results into a new wave to create a summary we can share with a different group of people.

Wave brings three key things; proper collaborative documents which will encourage referring rather than cutting and pasting; proper version control for documents; and document automation through easy access to webservices. Commenting, version control and provenance, and making a cut and paste operation actually a fully functional and intelligent embed are key to building a framework for a web-native lab notebook.

Cameron’s ideas about Wave might not be able to achieve in the near future. However, the plain Google Wave is very cool already. Try it and you will know. Or, just check the Google IO demo video above. Don’t forget there are extensions; many many more powerful extensions are coming!

Let’s surf the Wave and celebrate the coming new age for collaborative research.