Google on Thursday offered some additional details about the fate
of Google Wave, the real-time communications platform that the
company discontinued last month.
Google Wave software engineer Alex North said in a blog post that
the Wave team is planning to release "Wave in a Box," a complete
package of Wave server and client software.
Wave in a Box will be open source code and will expand upon on the
existing 200,000-plus lines of code already available at
waveprotocol.org.
North said that the project won't duplicate Google's version of
Wave. But it should allow developers and businesses to run their
own Wave servers and clients using their own hardware.
Wave in a Box will include the application bundle, supporting
real-time collaboration between servers and clients, a Wave panel
for threaded conversations in the client, persistent Wave storage
and search capabilities, improved client-server protocols, support
for gadget, robot, and data APIs, and support for both Wave data
importation and Wave federation.
In a post to the Wave protocol developer forum, North said that the
Wave team aims to make the specific improvements mentioned in his
blog post by the end of the year.
As Google steps back from Wave, enterprise software providers like
Novell and SAP are keeping the flame alive. When Google announced
that it would end Wave development in August, Novell reaffirmed its
commitment to Pulse, its Wave-based collaboration product.
Wave's key innovation, its operational transformation technology,
is already showing up in other Google services. On Tuesday, for
example, Google said that Docs users can now follow edits being
made by document collaborators through highlighted text, a
real-time capability similar to editing in Wave.