Google Wave Looking To Join Apache Software Foundation 79
MMacFadden writes "The Google Wave team has officially submitted the open source version of Wave to the Apache Software Foundation as a candidate Incubator project. Google hopes that the wave technology will continue to grow, supported by the new open source community (which is made up of Google and non-Google employees alike). Here is the proposal itself."
Re:Hope (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:great app, lousy implementation (Score:3, Insightful)
For me it depended on the browser. With Firefox it was slow, okay with Safari, and seamless with Chrome. Not surprising, and probably wouldn't still be the case had they not abandoned the project. Although it's a niche product, it's really good at what it does and has the potential to be great. Hopefully the open source community does some neat things with it.
Re:great app, lousy implementation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:great app, lousy implementation (Score:3, Insightful)
They built Wave using some kind of Java toolkit that hid the JavaScript frontend code from programmers.
Let's call the demon by its name: Google Web Toolkit [google.com].
If they had hand-coded the frontend and written a lightweight backend, Wave would likely still be around.
I'm not so sure about that. Wave didn't fail for technical reasons. It failed because there was no transition path (No mail gateway for a mail replacement? wtf? XMPP-IM at least gets that part right.) and bad management (they expected a private beta for a walled garden solution to take off immediately).
Re:Hope (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the idea of Wave is still brilliant, but it does need some polishing. My biggest beef is with the user interface. A big wave can quickly turn into a confusing mess. What's new? What's old? What do I still need to respond to?
I need more tools to manage my view on the wave. Close bits, split different subthreads with diverging topics into separate waves, flag messages as read, unread, important, interesting to others, archive-worthy, etc.
The technology is very powerful, but it needs a better UI to do it justice.