Google begins open-sourcing Wave

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 29 Jul 2009 at 08:58

Google has open-sourced two chunks of Wave, the technology it's described as "the next generation of communication".

Wave merges instant messaging, document collaboration, email and social-networking into one web-based client.

The software is currently in beta, and in an attempt to proliferate Wave across the web Google has already promised to open source the "lion's share" of its client and server code, as well as the underlying protocol.

The company has taken its first steps on delivering that promise by open-sourcing the "Operational Transform" code that's the basis of Wave, as well as a simple client/server prototype that uses the Wave protocol.

The search giant calls the OT code the "the heart and soul of the collaborative experience in Wave", while the client/server prototype is intended to get developers playing with the underlying protocol.

Wave was debuted back at Google I/O back in May, but the code being open-sourced has been altered considerably since then.

"Since Google I/O, we've been iterating on the draft protocol specification, and have made substantial enhancements to the Operational Transformation algorithm to the point where the open source code is actually ahead of the algorithm implemented in our servers in production," notes Software Engineers Jochen Bekmann on the Google blog.