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>pg>: 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&…
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&g…
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.h…ml>.
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/e0347…
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/705d1…
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.…
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-san…
The
Official Google
Blog<http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/surfs-up-wednesday-google-wa…
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/>t/>.
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/>communitymunity, 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/a1y3000…
at
Dreamforce <http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF09/site/> this year.
Niels
http://nielsmayer.com