Finally there is an update to the Google Wave robot API. In the blog Introducing Robots API v2: The Rise of Active Robots the new features are described.

It is really nice to see that a lot of new features has been delivered. It is a long time since the last release of any updates on the API, so it looked like the development or patching had stopped. But this new release solves many of the problems that have exists. I have written my comments to all to all of the functions.

• Active API: In v2, robots can now push information into waves (without having to wait to respond to a user action). This replaces the need for our deprecated cron API, as now you can update a wave when the weather changes or the stock price falls below some threshold. You can learn more in the Active API docs.
  

This features is really useful for enterprise contexts, where it is required that you will be able to update the wave based on external events. With this features you can get a new Wave, when something happens that you need to react to. From the SAP perspective there is Universal Worklist where all events that you have to process are. With this Wave you can achieve some of the same ideas.

• Context: Robots can now more precisely specify how much information they want to get back from a particular event. If only the contents of the affected blip needs updating and you want to reduce your robot’s bandwidth, then you can specify the new ‘SELF’ context. On the flip side, if you do need all the information in the wavelet, you can specify the new ‘ALL’ context. You can learn more in the Context docs.
  

With this enhancement it will be much easier for robots to interact with the wave, because they can get a much better control of what the data is need in each instance. This will make the development easier because you got the date that you need and it will specify the data you need.

• Filtering: In a similar way, with this new API, the robot can specify what events it needs to respond to, conserving valuable bandwidth — and ignore all those that don’t apply. You can learn more in the Filtering Events docs.

With this function you will only get the events that you need in your robots. Simply create a regular expression and then only the entries matching the expression is sent. This is quite useful if you only want events, when a large number of capital letters is written.

• Error reporting: Robots are now able to register to receive errors about failed operations, such as insertion on non-existent ranges. You can learn more in the Error Reporting docs.
  

This function will make it possible to make better and more stabile robots. The use requires that you work, how the robot should interact when an error is created.

• Proxying-For: Robots can now convey to Google Wave that their actions are actually on behalf of a different user, via the proxyingFor field. For robots like the Buggy sample, which connects with the Google Code issue tracker, this means that the wave can be updated with attribution to users on non-wave systems. You can learn more in the Proxying-For docs.
  

I can see that this function will be really interesting when working with one place to monitor all of your solution. It will also make collaboration with external partners much easier.

With all of this information it looks like the robots have been much more decentralized and acts as regular clients. So in the principle the new features will allow you to create a client to Wave using the robot API and some proxy functionality.

There is still room for improvements in the API. This is the two things that I see that currently are missing.

• Better form handling and the ability to apply styles to the forms, so they don’t look as 90ish.
• UPDATE: This is also possible. Integration with Gadgets, so the robots can update the gadgets with new information. With the Active API is this even more interesting. It is now possible to update the statistic gadget when you get a new expression.

Pamela Fox has created a great presentation describing what how the features connect.

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Now it seems like the story about 12sprints have leaked a bit more. Since Cmswire and also a blog on SAP Developer Network, so I will also be able to write about it.

12sprints or constellation, which it also has been know as, i a service developed by SAP.

I got access to 12sprints on Monday as  a part of the SAP Mentors forum. I’m not sure how much, I can talk about the product. I’m not allowed to show screen shots of the application before the launch. On the frontpage of 12sprints.com are some screenshots of the information provided by SAP/12sprints.

I have just tried using 12sprint a little to see how it feels like,  so I’m unable to fully compare it to Wave. It has a nice interface and are able to use the functions quite easy. I have not seen how the multi user functionality works, or if it is real time.

12Sprints is a tool for creating decisions based on the response from multiply persons. So it is target more towards enterprises, and but it could probably also make sense to use 12sprints when you need to make decision with your spouse on where to go on vacation.

To assist with the decission making are diffrent tools like pro/con tables or cost benefit tables, you can use collectivly. It would be the same kinds of tools you would use to make a decision in a group normaly.

Compared to Wave 12sprints are more structured and probably easier to find and comment on decisions in. I see that you can have more unstructured data in Wave, but with the right tools/gadget in Wave you could create an environment close to 12sprints. I’m going to look future into how 12sprints works and when to use it over Wave.

Follow 12sprints on twitter, to get more updates on the release.

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I was talking a person how was using Lotus Notes to administrate some of their interfaces towards the users. That made me think if Google Wave can replace Lotus Notes.

I have been using Notes 6.5 and seen some of their databases. I did try to create some databases/application back in Notes 5. I was not really great at creating the applications. Some of the companies I have worked with have been using Notes to mange parts of their enterprise. Some use notes to employees easy has access to create new customers instead of using the more complex SAP screen for it. Or to build workflow applications to make the approval process of new customers easier than developing the same in SAP. I have also seen Databases with extract from SAP, where Notes just was a different interface.

I have not see how the newest version of Notes 8.5 works, but a lot of improvements should have been implemented to make it even more user friendly. I have always seen Notes as a system which was not really user friendly. The previous versions of Notes mail solution was not worth using compared to outlook, but the new version should be better. So I have always thought the killer app of notes was the many databases you could create and not the mail feature.

Lotus Notes is like Wave a collaborative software, which helps many people work together. I don’t think it is possible to edit documents together. But Notes has the Instant messaging feture, which works nicely together with the email contact. I see Notes databases as a strong force that it has the option of synchronization to off-line work.

Can you create an application on Google Wave to perform the same as you would to in a Notes database? Lots of the examples that I have created like the workflow and form demo, es-robot could be examples an example of where an application was exposed on Wave instead of the ERP system. That is basically what Notes also does.

Wave is not a good container for lots of unstructured data. In the instance we want to have our customers in Google Wave, we can either create a Wave pr customer or we can create one Wave with all the customers. The best would probably to have one Wave pr customer. It will be easy to find a specific customer using the search function, for name or street. But if we need all customers in the northern part of Zeeland ie post numbers 1000-3000 it will be difficult. You could tag the customers with lots of different tags like area, this will require a structured approach to create the customers.

When you have found the customer you want to perform an action on there could be a form making it possible to create order in a new Wave or a link to the Wave of previous orders.

It would be interesting to have all orders in Wave. I don’t think that it will create so much value, because you can just find them but not do anything with them. I think that it will be a bit deficult to make a great Wave robot/gadget for analizing changing sales orders. From my experiacnes with sales orders is that they are quite complex, when you use scheduling and have different processes for handling them.

But back to the question if  Wave will replace Lotus notes. I think that companies what to have their data more structured, which Lotus Notes supports best. In university I learned about the semi structured data, but I don’t see that it adopted on a massive scale.  On a longer sight there might be a swift toward using unstructured data to store data unstructured, with the structured data in the ERP system. I think Wave could be one of the places where Notes databases should be dropped.

If the development APIs for Wave became better to make applications, it would probably be easier to expose your data in Wave.

Image fo.ol

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I’m currently waiting for invites to the live Wave system,. The sandbox works still fine, so I can still collaborate. So an obvious choose is to follow up on what is happening and research for news. Try to have a look at the API’s for the system, and then you can start your development. Try to get the AppEngine plugin up and running.

There are some interesting blogs, to read for the day. ReadWriteWeb has an article on what to expect from the Wave launch, this gives some interesting pointers to how the launch will take place. Among that you can nominate 8 friends with invitations. There will be no new features for the wave system.

Lars Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon wrote about what he google blog. They write about the teams process and the fun they had when they was at a school and had the children write stories together. Lars and Stephanie believe that people will be more productive with wave when communicating and collaborating, which I believe is a large part of the day. I would have to agree with them.

Stephanie Hannon also wrote about what happened in the wave sandbox on the google blog. She mentions the SAP and Sales force as some of the vendors how have made some impressive demos of the potentials.

Stop checking the twitter channel for #googlewave, it is way to full today so you will just get a lot of messages. It is really difficult to follow the conversations. The just wait till people starts receiving the team had received of feedback and the use cases which was presented from the sandbox period.

So when you get online try to check out the maps gadget, Pamela Fox has made.

Then hope that you get an invitation. I just hope that I get an invitation for my domain, so I can start collaborating with the team.

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I created the SAP Enterprise service robot, which is described in the blog. I wanted to give you an explanation on how this robot was implemented.

I have therefore created a 5 minutes screen capture, showing what is going on and what the moveable parts are. Probably 5 minutes is a little too short, but if you have anything, which you want me to explain, I will do it. I hope you find it interesting.

I’m not proud of using crafted XML documents, instead of sending SOAP documents. But it was the only way that I could find to call SOAP web services from Appengine. If you have any suggestions to how I can avoid this, please let me know.

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Some weeks ago I made a demo of how SAP ES could be reached from a Google Wave. This was just to show it was possible to call ES. That demo did not help in any workflow; it just showed some data to the user. I have now worked with getting a better idea for coming up with a demo, which shows how wave can be leveraged to implement a better solution. I need this demo for my Virtual Community Day presentation on Thursday the 24 of September at 16 CET.

This demo is about creating services requests for a customer. In the scenario the customer adds the robot, which displays all the equipment items the customer has. The customer then selects the item which is broken, and creates a service request on this item. When the request is created using another enterprise service, a technician is added to the wave to help the customer solve the problem. This will allow the participants to write to each other showing how things work out.

An extension of this demo, would obvious be a place where the two participants could change the status. So the task would be completed, when they have solved the problem.

This demo is also created by SAP as a Composite application (CE), but using CE will only create the request. It will not allow the participants to help fix the problem in just one place. I believe it is in this place the Wave Robots has something value adding compared to normal web applications. There still need to be some development to get a more compelling look and feel. I’m not sure what is possible to do with styling and creating tables but the view should be styled before an Enterprise ready application is created.

How this was done

As with the last demo, I have not been able to run Axis2 on Google App-engine, where robots currently have to be implemented. It seems like Axis2 is using raw sockets, which is not allowed on Appengine. I have therefore created SOAP-XML in hand and just submitted them via the URL connection. This XML I got by using SOAPUI, which is an excellent SOAP client for testing services. By using SOAPUI I could craft and test XML calls before spending time on implementing them in Java. It is also possible to use the Webservice test tool in connected to the Enterprise Repository. For some of the request it is possible to get some basic test data delivered.

When I got a response back I have used a SAX parser to handle the requests. This works great to store the information for later retrieval by the robot. It would have saved some time on this front also if the Axis2 would work. For the three calls I perform, I use three different parsing strategies. I though learned something from this, so I’m happy.

Output to the wave was pretty straight forward using the Robot apis. I only had some problems with some of the used keys between the different blips. To remember the item name, I store the item in the Memcache. That way it is easy to store data between different requests. I did have a problem with the robot, which believed that it should react to its own requests. That was not a good idea, and it created a lot of blips in the wave. So when developing robots, do not react to events performed by the robot itself or any of the robots at the @gwave.com domain.

The code for the robot can be found in the sap-wave repository.

Before deploying this code you self you need to change the WebserviceHelper class, and add you own username and password to the SAP ES demo systems as Basic authentication parameters.

Notice this blog is cross posted to SAP SCN.

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For this week there has been some interesting Wave blogs.

• SAP Research in Brisbane had created a screen cast of their first Gadget. A gadget where people could collaborate on creating a process model. After the collaboration was done it was possible to export the process model and implement the model in SAP BPM. The screen cast show how complex gadgets can be and how they can assist with the collaboration. Also see Richards Hircsh response, which contains some insight full comments about the status.
• LinkedProcess trying to make a more general protocol for Wave. The blog Social Computing or Let the bots talk! Gives a great overview of the technology, which allows the user to submit scripts to be executed on other hosts via XMPP.
• CodeBot – A Coding Robot for Google Wave contains a demo on how to syntax highlight code in the wave.
• Eye on FDA: Google Wave, Part 2 Examples on how Wave can be used in the pharmacy industry to help in some of the processes they have. It is always nice to get some concrete examples on how Wave can be used to help organizations.
• App Engine SDK 1.2.5 released which is not Wave, but has some very interesting perspectives for Wave. It supports XMPP, which could mean that it is possible create wave clients/servers on Appengine.
• I found the youtube video embedded below on, it is rather old now. It contains some interesting facts. 50 enginers in Google working on Wave. Make sure the protocol is open. Takes 2½ half year with the first wave application, but they hope that other groups will implement servers faster. Google compliments Twitter, and are working on ways to integrate twitter closer with wave.
• Björn Wibben has created a blog about using jQuery in gadgets it looks quite interesting.
• 7 Reasons Why Google Wave Is Going To Be Awesome
  has some interesting summerization of the features of Wave.

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