Google Wave: Up and Running

General Structure of a Robot

As we’ve seen, robots are mini-apps in the cloud that typically respond to events in a wave (this information is exchanged by way of the Google Wave Robot Wire Protocol).^[34] Robots are highly extensible, and they can operate in a variety of ways, including as standalone applications or as composite applications.

As standalone applications, robots generally process information without using any external APIs or web services. Obviously then, as composite applications, robots leverage third-party APIs or web services, such as the Flickr or Twitter APIs (see Figure 6-7).

Figure 6-7. Standalone robots process information and produce content without accessing other applications or APIs. Composite robots rely on external applications and/or APIs for their content.

Both of the robots we covered in the first section, Geo Bot and Recipe Bot, are examples of composite robots. Oracle Bot, which we covered in the previous chapter, is an example of a standalone robot. Depending on your overall objective and use case, your use of the Google Wave Robots API will be shaped by how you decide that your code will process, transform, and exchange information with a wave.

Client Libraries

Robots rely on client libraries for programming languages supported by App Engine. App Engine currently supports Python and Java, although support for additional languages may be added in the ...