Google Wave: Up and Running

Quick! Let’s Create an Extension Installer!

Adding the Wave Mood Gadget manually is OK, but it’s not optimal in terms of user experience. Making the gadget accessible through an extension installer allows participants to add the gadget through a button in the conversation pane toolbar, and it also allows participants to reuse the gadget more easily in other waves.

List of Ingredients

• Source code text editor or IDE configured for XML

• Image-editing app or clip art

• Access to a web server

We’ll be setting up a simple extension installer that hooks into the toolbar, adding a button with a custom icon that inserts the Wave Mood Gadget when clicked.

The Extension Installer Manifest

The structure and elements in our gadget installer are fairly straightforward. As you may remember from The extension manifest, the extension element has several attributes that specify the name, description, and URL for a preview thumbnail of the gadget. The <author> element is self-explanatory, while the MenuHook element specifies that the gadget should be added to a toolbar. The MenuHook element also includes text for the menu item and a URL for an icon to be used in the toolbar. Lastly, the insertGadget element specifies a URL to the gadget. In this case, the URL references the gadget we created in the previous section.

<extension name="Wave Mood Gadget" description="Displays the Google-o-meter to indicate the current mood of the wave" thumbnailUrl="http://cartosoft.com/lab/gadgets/mood-gadget/thumbnail.png"> <author ...