Tinkering with Google Wave Gadgets and Robots

Google is hosting a Hackathon on Saturday focusing on Wave. For Wave, you can create Gadgets or Robots. I wanted to be able to monitor and control my house's non-existent burglar alarm and X10 appliances from inside a Wave. A Gadget is the best thing for that, which you'll see (entitled "Home Controller") on the right side of this blog.

Assuming my machine at home is running the client code (which doesn't really control anything, it just fakes it), you can use the command "feed the cat" with password "abcd" to change the cat's state from hungry to full, or "wait a minute" to change the cat from full to hungry. Be patient, it can take up to fifteen seconds before your command produces a visible result. The Gadget and the client code are both polling a teeny web service on App Engine which passes information between them, and the polling rate is not hasty. The Gadget's source is hosted on Google Code. A not-too-detailed description is here.

Robots require working directly with the Wave API, which Gadgets don't. Here is a Robot that will help you look stuff up in the Linux kernel source code, using the LXR website. To use the Robot in a wave, first add it to your Gmail contacts. Use the name "Lxreffy" and the email address "wware-lxreffy@appspot.com". Now go into Wave and search for the contact "Lxreffy", and you'll be able to invite it into any Wave. Then type "LXR: foobar" in a blip, and hit "Done", and it will append a series of web links to the blip showing where "foobar" appears in the kernel. Example screenshot below.



Another Robot uses SymPy to enable symbolic algebra to be done within a Wave. The "SymPy { ... }" piece is typed by the human user, and the Robot responds by adding the response from SymPy.


Rosie คือโปรแกรมคอมพิวเตอร์สำหรับการแปลภาษามนุษย์เขียนโดย Google. ลักษณะที่ฉันชอบไม่ได้งานดีมาก. ฉันจะใส่ข้อความภาษาไทยนี้บนบล็อกของฉัน.