Google Wave: Up and Running

The App Engine Tango

If you’re still becoming familiar with App Engine, it may seem that working with the App Engine SDK, client libraries, and App Engine itself is a convoluted process. As with other development processes, once you become accustomed to how App Engine works, it will seem less convoluted. Once your robot is in the cloud, you will appreciate some of the advantages to hosting an application on App Engine.

Warning

Remember that for the time being App Engine has a limit of 10 applications per account and that, once created, applications cannot be renamed or deleted.

Locals Are Not Welcome (for Now): Testing in the Cloud

Since we’re still in the early days of the Robots API, there are some missing pieces in the overall development framework. Google Wave relies on HTTP requests using the Wave Robot Protocol. Consequently, there is no readily available means for Google Wave to contact your robot in your local development environment.

For the time being, you must deploy your robot to App Engine prior to testing and using it. Thus, to develop and test a “production-quality” robot, you really need to have two instances of the robot running on App Engine: a stable version and a development version. I won’t dwell too much on this issue, because the Google Wave team has indicated that it will release some additional tools in the near future that will allow for the testing and debugging of robots using the local App Engine SDK server.

Logs and Debugging

Once you have your App Engine ...