You may have noticed that at the end of RuPy there will be a Google Wave hackthon run by Jose Quesada from Max Planck Institute in Berlin. For those of you who want to take part in it – to make everything work smoothly – below there’s a grasp of information form Jose.

Three-paragraph intro to wave

The best (short) introduction I could find is this extract from a future oreilly book. For a longer one, based on how to _use_ it (not develop with the API!), see this book by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash. And to understand why XMPP and wave could change how we program for the web, read this blog post.

For a developer, there are robots and gadgets. If you know igoogle gadgets, that kind of functionality is what you can embed on a wave. Bots look like Wave users, but they’re programmed to edit and update the contents of waves. So the main difference between a gadget and a bot is that the latter acts as an user and can edit content. A simple example would be a robot that automatically corrects typos or does code  highlighting. Almost any iGoogle or OpenSocial gadget can run within Google Wave. There are thoushands of those out there in the public domain (you may have created one). Here is a list of  available wave robots, and here’s another with more details.

There is currently a restriction in place that requires robots to live on Google App Engine so you need to code in something supported there. Python seems to be the best documented, but since there’s a JVM Jruby and groovy should be possible.

TODO list for a  successful hackathon

1. Come with an idea of what you want to do. Better yet, try to find code to reuse close to that idea,  because we only have 3 hours
2. Get the Google App Engine tools, install them, and play with them a little, make sure you can display hello world
3. Checkout the google wave resources repo
4. Tell us how much you have done in wave already (from reading docs to publishing a tool) in this survey.