(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — A month after announcing it is discontinuing to develop the Google Wave (www.waveprotocol.org) as a standalone product, Google (www.google.com) has announced plans to expand the existing Wave server and web client into a more complete application or “Wave in a Box,” available to anyone wanting to host it.
Wave was introduced last year, featuring a combination of email, instant messaging, wikis, and blogging abilities that paved the way for real-time and stored collaborative messaging.
According to a Thursday announcement in the form of a blog entry from Google Wave software engineer Alex North, the company plans to expand the 200 thousand lines of open source Wave code to flesh out an application bundle that includes a server and Web client supporting real-time collaboration using Wave’s structured conversations.
Some new features will include a MongoDB-based persistent store and search implementation, as well as refinements to the client-server protocols, gadget, robot and data API support, and the ability to import wave data from wave.google.com. Project managers also hope to add the ability to federate across other Wave in a Box instances.
“While Wave in a Box will be a functional application, the future of Wave will be defined by your contributions,” North wrote. “We hope this project will help the Wave developer community continue to grow and evolve. We’ll discuss more technical details of our plan on the Wave Protocol Forum, which is the best place to keep up with the latest progress on the open source project and learn how you can contribute…Wave on.”
The Google Wave team mentioned on a company newsgroup that it plans to make the specific improvements mentioned in the blog post by the end of the year.
This collaboration suite, once revamped, could compete with similar products such as Microsoft’s collaboration platform Sharepoint, which has enjoyed considerable success in the enterprise space.
At the time of Wave’s launch, Information Week wrote that while Wave “has the potential to blunt the success of Microsoft’s SharePoint,” the company is not positioning it as such. “[Vic] Gundotra at a press conference following the Wave demonstration highlighted Wave’s openness as something lacking in SharePoint. Within a year or two, businesses considering SharePoint but worried about vendor lock-in may have an attractive lightweight alternative.”
It remains to be seen if this new incarnation of Wave will offer an alternative to SharePoint, but it is something of which Web hosts should be mindful.
