The Independent Wave

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In 1965 the first standard was proposed for a method of communicating electronically with other users on a shared system.

In the intervening years much has changed in the world. Nations have risen and fallen, the Punk, Goth and Grunge movements have left their marks on the world of music and our mobile phones have gone from bricks with antenae to sleek devices with more computing grunt than those first multi-user mainframes.

However, what hasn't changed much is electronic mail. In the intervening years, email has remained the same, static, simple and flawed. While there have been a number of attempts to rebuild the email model, most of which have concentrated on trying to shoehorn more and more into the original standards. None of these have been particularly successful.

At the 2009 Google IO Conference a new initiative was announced that promised to be “what email would look like if it was invented today”. Led by the Rasmussen brothers (famed for the development of Googles Mapping Service), the new system entitled “Wave” drew on lessons learnt from the last fifty years of electronic communication, including email, instant messaging, micro-blogging and even software source revision control systems to create a collaborative conversation tool that promised to really shake up the way we communicate online.

Just after the IO Conference Google opened up the Google Wave Sandbox, essentially a play ground for developers to become familiar with the API's that Google was offering. However more importantly, Google announced that it would be offering both code and white papers that would allow people to setup their own Wave servers, thus creating the foundations for a Wave that organisations can take behind their firewalls.

This book will take a look at what will be required to build this Independent Wave. We will examine everything from Federation, through the various proposals for Client / Server protocols to the building of Agents and their place in the Independent Wave.