[xwiki-devs] Google wave and Xwiki integration ==> solve comment issues in Xwiki?
I just got my Google Wave<http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/>invite and have been trying to understand how I can use it with my Xwiki <http://xwiki.org>-based application (soon launching on http://trainspodder.com see example-screen<http://nielsmayer.com/prototype-11-17-2009.jpg>: my interest in Wave is because my site, in google-parlance, is basically a "wave for deep-linking/commenting/annotating/transcluding&mashing streaming audio&video media"). One of the areas that I think Wave would help Xwiki-based applications (and wikis/sites) is with "Viral commenting" so that Wave becomes a central place for comments and conversations on web pages. As it "socially networks" comments, this enables FOAFs to more easily find out about internet conversations that might otherwise be hidden away on a website that nobody knows about.. Thus, Wave provides a viral commenting mechanism for Xwiki pages that is potentially superior to the other alternatives previously available, e.g. http://massol.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/AnonymousComments :
XWiki Enterprise allows users to leave comments on pages. However in order to prevent spam on your public wiki instance you usually only want to allow registered users the right to add comments. Thus we need a solution that still allows guest users to leave comments while preventing spam.
I'm proposing 2 solutions that I've both tried on this blog and that have worked well: Solution 1: create a special guest account that can be used transparently to leave comments. This can be achieved by creating a custom skin and tweaking the comments form Solution 2: integrate with an external comment web service such as IntenseDebate <http://www.intensedebate.com/>. This also requires a custom skin in order to override some templates.
It also solves the "commenting" issues in Xwiki that include (1) controlling comment spam by forcing commenters to login with real Xwiki accounts to post comments; (2) the lack of well-integrated and "working right out of the box" captcha support in Xwiki to prevent comment spam w/o authentication/login; (3) lack of "out of the box" OpenID support which would allow easy authentication of public users wanting to leave comments; (4) users wanting to leave comments constantly forgetting the accounts and passwords under which they left comments, as well as not having a centralized place to follow-up on comments they've left, or conversations they've been involved in. Wave seems to solve some of the problems, and might help side-step a lot of others in Xwiki.... for example, why spend a huge amount of effort tightly integrating OpenID or some other certificate/2FA/SSO-based auth system for the class of wikis that comprise a small number of editors and site maintainers, and a large number of commenters and public that you want to authenticate, identify, and spam-control -- perhaps Xwiki's login/auth system is perfectly adequate for this class of sites, but becomes "overwhelmed" by logins and accounts that have been created automatically, or just for the purpose of posting a single comment (if people even bother to create an account to leave a comment...). Integrating Wave or IntenseDebate <http://www.intensedebate.com/> into Xwiki might give the user experience desired, without the complexity.... Yesterday, I posted the following to an "Xwiki wave" I started: https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252Bedlc50w0G<https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:googlewave.com%21w%252Bedlc50w0G>(please join and lets try this thing out!!) ................................... FYI, here are some ways Wave has been integrated into other platforms (note MediaWiki integration, can it be leveraged for Xwiki?) Taken from http://wave.google.com/help/wave/extensions.html (1) MediaWiki integration: My Wave wet dream<http://mediawikiwave.blogspot.com/2009/10/my-wave-wet-dream.html> I have been asked several times where I see Wave <https://wave.google.com/>go. The last time I was asked where I see Wave in 5 years time.. not Internet years. What I did was look hard at Wave for what it does, and look at Google <http://google.com/> for the kind of things it has been doing. For me, Wave is an environment where the functionality of e-mail, chat, wiki comes together. What we have done in the MediaWikiWave<http://mediawikiwave.org/>project is provide Wave with a publishing back end. This is something that MediaWiki <http://mediawiki.org/> does really well. I expect that Wave will continue to integrate parts of the puzzle that is computer software and data. Google is getting into operating systems with its Chrome OS<http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html>. Add to this Moore's law <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law> and in five years time a computer with Chrome OS, with over a terabyte of storage is not a wild idea at all. When something like a terabyte is used for caching, I can imagine that this cache is maintained by Wave. In this cache you find e-mail, Wavelets, Wiki pages and other information that is of interest to a user. Wave being Wave, will cache this information and updates it in the background. This information will be available on request. Wave in its architecture allows for multiple servers. It is not necessary to know on what server a particular Wavelet is available. I think that a user is not that interested in any particular server, he is interested in the data being available. Only when the data is manipulated is there a need for immediate feed back to servers or other computers. I think this is doable. Part of the cache is already there in Google Gears<http://gears.google.com/>and this makes this vision evolutionary progress. Thanks, GerardM (2) SAP integration: Gravity – Collaborative Business Process Modelling within Google Wave<http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/15618> Gravity is a prototype developed by SAP Research in Brisbane, Australia and SAP NetWeaver Development providing real-time, cloud-based collaborative business process modelling within Google Wave <http://wave.google.com/>. Google Wave is Google's new real-time collaboration platform that combines features of e-mail, social networking, wikis and instant messaging in one integrated browser-based client. Google Wave offers rich developer APIs to extend the core functionality with custom components. We have embedded Gravity as a Google Wave "gadget" that can be added within the Google Wave client. Leveraging the collaborative features of Google Wave, all business process modelling activities get propagated in near real-time to all other participants of the Wave. In addition, participants of the Wave can use all other features provided by Google and its developer community to enrich the collaborative modelling experience. In the demo we see how Gravity can be used to facilitate the development of high level process descriptions for two merging companies, BCD South Bank and FH Insurance. These two companies are merging in a tough economic climate and management need to quickly re-engineer their business processes in order to capitalise from cross-selling opportunities between banking and insurance products. In addition to the near real-time propagation of model content to all participants of a Wave, various features of true real-time collaboration are shown, such as different colour-coding for each individual modeller, history of a model, asynchronous and synchronous editing, and more. The demo also shows how robots (automated components that act as Wave participants) can be leveraged in order to syntactically correct the model on the fly. In the end, we will see how models are exported using BPMN 2.0 XML. They will then be imported into SAP Netweaver BPM for further refinement and execution. The demo shows how new technology can be systematically leveraged in order to facilitate what Business Process Management is really about: business user collaboration within and across departments of one or more organisations. Please check out the high resolution screencam<https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/elearn?rid=/library/uuid/e03471b6-db79-2c10-0681-b428df45d83c&overridelayout=true>by clicking on the Gravity screenshot above. If you experience problems with the Podcast, please click here for more versions including a low resolution of the screencam<https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/elearn?rid=/library/uuid/705d166b-dd79-2c10-179e-ac6d8503fdef>or view the embedded screencam below. (3) Salesforce.com <http://salesforce.com/> integration: Getting in Front of the Wave<http://blog.sforce.com/sforce/2009/09/getting-in-front-of-the-wave.html> On Wednesday, September 30th, Google will open up their Wave<http://wave.google.com/>preview to about 100,000 people. Details are at Google Wave Developer Blog<http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-happened-in-wave-sandbox.html>and The Official Google Blog<http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/surfs-up-wednesday-google-wave-update.html>I am excited to announce that we have put together a new demo <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQ0b1CVRZHs> on how you might leverage the Wave platform on salesforce.com and how you might leverage salesforce.com from Wave. Wave is a truly exciting and seminal Cloud technology. Google Wave was invented by two brothers Jens Rasmussen<http://www.crunchbase.com/person/jens-rasmussen>andLars Rasmussen <http://www.crunchbase.com/person/lars-rasmussen> at Google that builds on the concepts of AJAX combined with fresh look at Operation Transformation <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation>. It's difficult at this point in time to fully understand the ways in which this technology may transform web based communication. It will be up to the community of developers working within and without the enterprise to realize the evident potential of Wave.
From a technical perspective, Wave has the ability to interact with other cloud platforms, like the Force.com <http://developer.force.com/> platform. It is this interaction that we have demonstrated in relatively short time frame in the demonstration announced in this post.
The use case for the demo is a fictitious Mobile Services Company named Booyah. This company asks customers to register the products that they purchase and one piece of information that is returned upon registration is an email address for support. The email address is actually to a Wave robot created by the company's service and support organization. When a customer encounters a problem with their product, they can begin the process of resolution by contacting the robot from Google Wave. This initial contact begins an interaction to provide results from the company's knowledge base, which of course is implemented using salesforce.com's Service Cloud<http://www.salesforce.com/crm/customer-service-support/>. Through a short series of questions and responses a list of possible solutions to the customers problem can be presented. Behind the scenes, the robot identifies the customer by her Wave id and can tailor the interaction based on the customers purchase and support history providing a personalized yet automated path to resolution. The robot also creates a case on the salesforce.com side so that this support interaction can be managed by Booyah. To take the experience beyond a simple knowledge base search, the customer also has the option of requesting a live chat with an available support representative. This is where Google Wave really starts to shine. If none of the suggested solutions work for the customer, she can simply click a link to request a chat. Wave sends this request to the robot which in turn makes a request to salesforce.com to find an available representative. That representative is then added to the wave as a participant and the personalized service begins. Behind the scenes the robot request is evaluated by a salesforce.com web service built in Force.com <http://force.com/> Code. When the representative is found the web service creates a task and a reminder for the task and assigns it to the representative. The representative is, of course, working in the salesforce.com UI and sees an alert window as the reminder is triggered. The representative can simply click on the link to the case shown in the alert window to access the case. The cool part about this is that when the case was created, enough information about the wave was included so that the active wave could be embedded directly into the layout of the Case detail page. This embedded Wave has full interactive capability so that the support representative can carry on the conversation with the customer from the Case detail page. And, the wave, which was the original channel for the support case can be accessed at any point in time later, including all the interaction with the customer. I'm confident that with the creative minds in the Force.com<http://force.com/>community, as evidenced by the fantastic Sites created during our Sites contest, that many more and truly valuable use cases can be implemented by combining these two amazing platforms. If you want to learn more about creating Force.com <http://force.com/> and Wave solutions be sure to attend the Riding the (Google) Wave<http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF09/site/learn/tracks/a1y300000004CGeAAM/a1y300000004CFqAAM/>session at Dreamforce <http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF09/site/> this year. Niels http://nielsmayer.com
I have a few Google Wave invites yet (about 5), if anyone wants one, don't hesitate to ask, apparently they come quite quick now! So, I also try wave and I find it interesting, not new or revolution but worth spending some time on it. I'm not sure I could use it as it is everyday but I prefer this kind of concept to twitter or facebook which really doesn't bring anything new and I also really like the concept of robots... oh IRCbots are back :):):) ) But, each time I use it with friends, it ends into some threads and discussions which are hard to follow because it's a mess very quick. We tried the instant google translator: really nice concept (you type and each people see it in its language)... maybe you will lose some friends very quick when they see the translation and misunderstand what you say :)... But I think this is a good idea for real! But It reminds me on IRC chats with 10s of people speaking about different things at the same time or google groups with spam everywhere ;) Anyway, I agree it is worth studying what could be done with it! regards Pascal On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 10:21 PM, Niels Mayer <[email protected]> wrote:
I just got my Google Wave<http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/>invite and have been trying to understand how I can use it with my Xwiki <http://xwiki.org>-based application (soon launching on http://trainspodder.com see example-screen<http://nielsmayer.com/prototype-11-17-2009.jpg>: my interest in Wave is because my site, in google-parlance, is basically a "wave for deep-linking/commenting/annotating/transcluding&mashing streaming audio&video media").
One of the areas that I think Wave would help Xwiki-based applications (and wikis/sites) is with "Viral commenting" so that Wave becomes a central place for comments and conversations on web pages. As it "socially networks" comments, this enables FOAFs to more easily find out about internet conversations that might otherwise be hidden away on a website that nobody knows about.. Thus, Wave provides a viral commenting mechanism for Xwiki pages that is potentially superior to the other alternatives previously available, e.g. http://massol.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/AnonymousComments :
XWiki Enterprise allows users to leave comments on pages. However in order to prevent spam on your public wiki instance you usually only want to allow registered users the right to add comments. Thus we need a solution that still allows guest users to leave comments while preventing spam.
I'm proposing 2 solutions that I've both tried on this blog and that have worked well: Solution 1: create a special guest account that can be used transparently to leave comments. This can be achieved by creating a custom skin and tweaking the comments form Solution 2: integrate with an external comment web service such as IntenseDebate <http://www.intensedebate.com/ . This also requires a custom skin in order to override some templates.
It also solves the "commenting" issues in Xwiki that include (1) controlling comment spam by forcing commenters to login with real Xwiki accounts to post comments; (2) the lack of well-integrated and "working right out of the box" captcha support in Xwiki to prevent comment spam w/o authentication/login; (3) lack of "out of the box" OpenID support which would allow easy authentication of public users wanting to leave comments; (4) users wanting to leave comments constantly forgetting the accounts and passwords under which they left comments, as well as not having a centralized place to follow-up on comments they've left, or conversations they've been involved in.
Wave seems to solve some of the problems, and might help side-step a lot of others in Xwiki.... for example, why spend a huge amount of effort tightly integrating OpenID or some other certificate/2FA/SSO-based auth system for the class of wikis that comprise a small number of editors and site maintainers, and a large number of commenters and public that you want to authenticate, identify, and spam-control -- perhaps Xwiki's login/auth system is perfectly adequate for this class of sites, but becomes "overwhelmed" by logins and accounts that have been created automatically, or just for the purpose of posting a single comment (if people even bother to create an account to leave a comment...). Integrating Wave or IntenseDebate <http://www.intensedebate.com/> into Xwiki might give the user experience desired, without the complexity....
Yesterday, I posted the following to an "Xwiki wave" I started: https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252Bedlc50w0G<https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:googlewave.com%21w%252Bedlc50w0G> < https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:googlewave.com%21w%252Bedlc50w0G
(please join and lets try this thing out!!)
...................................
FYI, here are some ways Wave has been integrated into other platforms (note MediaWiki integration, can it be leveraged for Xwiki?)
Taken from http://wave.google.com/help/wave/extensions.html
(1) MediaWiki integration: My Wave wet dream< http://mediawikiwave.blogspot.com/2009/10/my-wave-wet-dream.html>
I have been asked several times where I see Wave <https://wave.google.com/>go. The last time I was asked where I see Wave in 5 years time.. not Internet years. What I did was look hard at Wave for what it does, and look at Google <http://google.com/> for the kind of things it has been doing.
For me, Wave is an environment where the functionality of e-mail, chat, wiki comes together. What we have done in the MediaWikiWave<http://mediawikiwave.org/>project is provide Wave with a publishing back end. This is something that MediaWiki <http://mediawiki.org/> does really well. I expect that Wave will continue to integrate parts of the puzzle that is computer software and data.
Google is getting into operating systems with its Chrome OS< http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html>. Add to this Moore's law <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law> and in five years time a computer with Chrome OS, with over a terabyte of storage is not a wild idea at all.
When something like a terabyte is used for caching, I can imagine that this cache is maintained by Wave. In this cache you find e-mail, Wavelets, Wiki pages and other information that is of interest to a user. Wave being Wave, will cache this information and updates it in the background. This information will be available on request.
Wave in its architecture allows for multiple servers. It is not necessary to know on what server a particular Wavelet is available. I think that a user is not that interested in any particular server, he is interested in the data being available. Only when the data is manipulated is there a need for immediate feed back to servers or other computers.
I think this is doable. Part of the cache is already there in Google Gears<http://gears.google.com/>and this makes this vision evolutionary progress.
Thanks,
GerardM
(2) SAP integration:
Gravity – Collaborative Business Process Modelling within Google Wave<http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/15618>
Gravity is a prototype developed by SAP Research in Brisbane, Australia and SAP NetWeaver Development providing real-time, cloud-based collaborative business process modelling within Google Wave <http://wave.google.com/>. Google Wave is Google's new real-time collaboration platform that combines features of e-mail, social networking, wikis and instant messaging in one integrated browser-based client. Google Wave offers rich developer APIs to extend the core functionality with custom components. We have embedded Gravity as a Google Wave "gadget" that can be added within the Google Wave client. Leveraging the collaborative features of Google Wave, all business process modelling activities get propagated in near real-time to all other participants of the Wave. In addition, participants of the Wave can use all other features provided by Google and its developer community to enrich the collaborative modelling experience.
In the demo we see how Gravity can be used to facilitate the development of high level process descriptions for two merging companies, BCD South Bank and FH Insurance. These two companies are merging in a tough economic climate and management need to quickly re-engineer their business processes in order to capitalise from cross-selling opportunities between banking and insurance products. In addition to the near real-time propagation of model content to all participants of a Wave, various features of true real-time collaboration are shown, such as different colour-coding for each individual modeller, history of a model, asynchronous and synchronous editing, and more. The demo also shows how robots (automated components that act as Wave participants) can be leveraged in order to syntactically correct the model on the fly. In the end, we will see how models are exported using BPMN 2.0 XML. They will then be imported into SAP Netweaver BPM for further refinement and execution.
The demo shows how new technology can be systematically leveraged in order to facilitate what Business Process Management is really about: business user collaboration within and across departments of one or more organisations.
Please check out the high resolution screencam< https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/elearn?rid=/library/uuid/e03471b6-db79-2c10-...
by clicking on the Gravity screenshot above. If you experience problems with the Podcast, please click here for more versions including a low resolution of the screencam< https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/elearn?rid=/library/uuid/705d166b-dd79-2c10-... or view the embedded screencam below.
(3) Salesforce.com <http://salesforce.com/> integration: Getting in Front of the Wave< http://blog.sforce.com/sforce/2009/09/getting-in-front-of-the-wave.html>
On Wednesday, September 30th, Google will open up their Wave<http://wave.google.com/>preview to about 100,000 people. Details are at Google Wave Developer Blog< http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-happened-in-wave-sandbox.html
and The Official Google Blog< http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/surfs-up-wednesday-google-wave-update... I am excited to announce that we have put together a new demo <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQ0b1CVRZHs> on how you might leverage the Wave platform on salesforce.com and how you might leverage salesforce.com from Wave.
Wave is a truly exciting and seminal Cloud technology. Google Wave was invented by two brothers Jens Rasmussen<http://www.crunchbase.com/person/jens-rasmussen>andLars Rasmussen <http://www.crunchbase.com/person/lars-rasmussen> at Google that builds on the concepts of AJAX combined with fresh look at Operation Transformation <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation>. It's difficult at this point in time to fully understand the ways in which this technology may transform web based communication. It will be up to the community of developers working within and without the enterprise to realize the evident potential of Wave.
From a technical perspective, Wave has the ability to interact with other cloud platforms, like the Force.com <http://developer.force.com/> platform. It is this interaction that we have demonstrated in relatively short time frame in the demonstration announced in this post.
The use case for the demo is a fictitious Mobile Services Company named Booyah. This company asks customers to register the products that they purchase and one piece of information that is returned upon registration is an email address for support. The email address is actually to a Wave robot created by the company's service and support organization. When a customer encounters a problem with their product, they can begin the process of resolution by contacting the robot from Google Wave.
This initial contact begins an interaction to provide results from the company's knowledge base, which of course is implemented using salesforce.com's Service Cloud<http://www.salesforce.com/crm/customer-service-support/>. Through a short series of questions and responses a list of possible solutions to the customers problem can be presented.
Behind the scenes, the robot identifies the customer by her Wave id and can tailor the interaction based on the customers purchase and support history providing a personalized yet automated path to resolution. The robot also creates a case on the salesforce.com side so that this support interaction can be managed by Booyah.
To take the experience beyond a simple knowledge base search, the customer also has the option of requesting a live chat with an available support representative. This is where Google Wave really starts to shine. If none of the suggested solutions work for the customer, she can simply click a link to request a chat. Wave sends this request to the robot which in turn makes a request to salesforce.com to find an available representative. That representative is then added to the wave as a participant and the personalized service begins.
Behind the scenes the robot request is evaluated by a salesforce.com web service built in Force.com <http://force.com/> Code. When the representative is found the web service creates a task and a reminder for the task and assigns it to the representative. The representative is, of course, working in the salesforce.com UI and sees an alert window as the reminder is triggered. The representative can simply click on the link to the case shown in the alert window to access the case.
The cool part about this is that when the case was created, enough information about the wave was included so that the active wave could be embedded directly into the layout of the Case detail page. This embedded Wave has full interactive capability so that the support representative can carry on the conversation with the customer from the Case detail page. And, the wave, which was the original channel for the support case can be accessed at any point in time later, including all the interaction with the customer.
I'm confident that with the creative minds in the Force.com<http://force.com/>community, as evidenced by the fantastic Sites created during our Sites contest, that many more and truly valuable use cases can be implemented by combining these two amazing platforms.
If you want to learn more about creating Force.com <http://force.com/> and Wave solutions be sure to attend the Riding the (Google) Wave< http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF09/site/learn/tracks/a1y300000004CGeA...
session at Dreamforce <http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF09/site/> this year.
Niels http://nielsmayer.com _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
Seems like there's a lot of overlap between Wave and things i've heard talked about as Xwiki's post-2.0 plans... google seems to be putting some additional weight behind Wave, or eliminating competitors: AppJet announced the Google acquisition<http://etherpad.com/ep/blog/posts/google-acquires-appjet>Friday.
"The EtherPad team will continue its work on real-time collaboration by joining the Google Wave team," the site said.
AppJet offered free and premium versions of its service, which could import
Microsoft Word documents, Web pages, PDFs, and plain text files, and let groups of people edit them collectively on what it called pad. A "time-slider" feature let people look back at earlier incarnations of a pad.
Google Wave has similarities. It's a sort of hybrid between instant
messaging, wikis, and e-mail. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt sees Google Wave as the future of collaboration</8301-30685_3-10380917-264.html>, in particular given its intrinsically networked nature and its real-time view of what collaborating people are up to.
That real-time collaboration is a thorny problem. It can be difficult to
permit multiple people permission to edit the same document at the same time while ensuring one person's changes don't interfere with another's work. And showing simultaneous work complicates a service's user interface, too.
Google Docs--the online word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation
services--also offers some simultaneous editing abilities. AppJet dings it in its EtherPad FAQ <http://etherpad.com/ep/about/faq>.
"With Google Docs it takes about 5 to 15 seconds for a change to make its
way from your keyboard to other people's screens," the site said. "Imagine if whiteboards or telephones had this kind of delay!"
Google Wave and Google Docs are perhaps the closest rivals to AppJet, but in
the big picture, the rivalry is between cloud computing and the way most people use productivity software today, on their PCs. Notably, though, Microsoft is working on an online version of its dominant Office suite.
Current EtherPad users should brace themselves for the end of the service:
"If you are a user of the Free Edition or Professional Edition, you can continue to use and edit your existing pads until March 31, 2010. No new free public pads may be created. Your pads will no longer be accessible after March 31, 2010, at which time your pads and any associated personally identifiable information will be deleted," AppJet said.
That left one user, JavaScript programmer and jQuery project creator, John
Resig, unhappy.
"Super-lame that Etherpad is shutting down. We used it all the time for
jQuery planning," Resig said in a tweet<http://twitter.com/jeresig/statuses/6347156410> on Friday.
participants (2)
-
Niels Mayer -
Pascal Voitot