Google Wave: Framework and Prototype

Google Wave seeks to conquer further pieces of Internet communication with a browser, among them mail, chat, blogs, wikis and collaborative document management. The search engine giant had previewed Wave at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco in early June, with an initial API and documentation. Now at their API Hackathon in Mountain View CA they follow up with their Operational Transform (OT) framework and a client/server prototype that uses the Wave protocol. Around 150 developers were witnesses at the Federation Day event.

"The OT code is the heart and soul of the collaborative experience in Google Wave," wrote Jochen Bekmann and Sam Thorogood in their blog covering the event. The OT framework allows multiple users to work collaboratively on a document over the WAN in real-time. The plan is to make the code part of the "production-quality reference implementation," with other other parts to follow.

The draft protocol specification, documentation and whitepapers are under Creative Commons licensing and the source code is available under the Apache 2.0 license.