I'll keep publishing

I just read an article on The Register about Ray Ozzie and why he thinks Google Wave is “anti-web”.

It’s a bizarre read because if it’s accurate he’s saying that the web relies on open standards, this coming from a Microsoft man, the worlds largest closed OS/Application stack vendor!

He’s probably confused between open standards and open source, but Microsoft has never embraced either of these anyway. How many thousands of hours have developers spent reverse engineering Microsoft protocols and file formats?

But to be fair to Ray he’s probably not the man to be commenting on agile real time web technologies, he’s built his reputation by understanding how large corporates work and building platforms they will use, like Lotus Notes and Groove (now part of Sharepoint).

I think he’s actually defending Mesh, which is built on RSS and Atom payloads, how quaint, good old fashioned poll and pull tech, at least Mesh is using Atom. Maybe someone will put up a Mesh<->Wave gateway.

There’s room for both HTTP polling (Comet, long polling, AJAX etc) and XMPP push on the net. In fact you can do XMPP over HTTP (BOSH). I wonder if Ray realises that the client-server part of Wave is HTTP?

The crux of it is that Wave isn’t “anti-web”, all the end user interaction is via a web browser and HTTP, it’s only the server to server component that uses Google Wave Federation Protocol (which is XMPP’ish).

Perhaps Ray has a new web (HTTP) server to server protocol he’d rather use?

I skipped through the Google Wave video again today and I must say that what they are showing us is a cool(ish) web app that’s really only looking good because of the near real time updates, which are driven by an XMPP back end with some smart HTTP connectivity, BOSH maybe?

So to be more critical than I have been to date, what’s new?

XMPP has been able to do this for years, look at the  ‘… is typing a message’ indicator on Jabber clients, those updates come via small XMPP stanzas (XML snippets) on the wire.

I’d guess that the pages we saw are an HTML rendering of the XMPP (XML) data stream and the real time updates are IQ stanzas, probably defined in Googles extension, I need to take a look.

So to answer my own question, “What’s new?”.  What’s new is a large high profile brand with deep pockets has seen the light and decided to put some R&D and marketing dollars into a project that really does show off the power of XMPP and HTTP combined, that’s the news and it’s good news.

So Wave is a good end point to aim for but it looks like an ‘all or nothing’ platform. It would be years before everyone replaced the mass of corporate email, IM and other collaboration platforms.

I expect we’ll see it as a Google only service for a while, maybe with some other players taking part, but even then they’ll need gateways to regular IM services and email for some time to come.

For now I’ll carry on coding xIMpp and very soon now Cleartext will have something to release that offers some of the messaging features Wave offers over XMPP by aggregating existing email, IM and micro-blogging services. I’m happy with a one step at a time approach.

Google announced Google Wave yesterday, described as ‘what would email look like if it was invented today’

Here’s my own bullet point summary;

• Moves Google along the real time web tech path
• Web based, close to real time collaborative messaging and content editing
• Desktop app user experience
• Browser part is Web 2.0+ tech based, that is extensive use of AJAX, HTML 5 etc
• Probably harder to create spam for as they underlying protocol is more secure
• Open sourced, mostly, protocol and some demo code available
• Everyone can run their own Wave servers
• Plugin architecture to add things like Twitter messaging.

You’ve all heard me bash on about XMPP, well Google Waves underlying transport protocol is XMPP with an open extension.
- http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/google-wave-architecture

In my opinion this will probably replace GMail. Wave’s addressing syntax is probably XMPP so GMail users will already have an account on the GMail domain.

In fact if the whole planet moved to Wave we’d just use our current email addresses, eg I’m already dbanes@cleartext.com on email and XMPP IM so I’d be the same on our corporate Wave server.

Main concern I have is bandwidth and message overhead, there was a lot of realtime data transfer going on in the demo, apparently at a character level, which is madness really.

We’ll have to hoppe that as the dev team is based here in Sydney (the Google Maps guys) that they’ve factored in poorly connected communities.

‘Wave’ is an extension of XMPP.
- http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/google-wave-architecture

The core of XMPP is ratified by the IETF and the XSF (XMPP Standards Foundation) manages the process of adding new functionality via XMPP Extension Protocols (XEPs)
- http://xmpp.org/extensions/

Hopefully Google will get Wave into the XSF process as a XEP.