The new v2 robot API released by the Google Wave team brings some highly requested features to the platform and provides developers with the flexibility to build intelligent, complex and more useful robots. A few of the highly requested features in the new API include

  • Performing actions outside of wave then fetching and updating waves without any user interaction
  • Actioning a wave on behalf of a different user and conveying this to a user
  • Refactoring the blip model to remove the document sub-model
  • Auto generation of capabilities.xml
  • Redesigning the event handling mechanism allowing developers to write much tidier and easier to understand code

We have been lucky at wave.to and have been able to play with early versions of the new API since late 2009 and now that we have a little experience with the API we want to help developers to get started now it is released. To do this we have developed a number of simple examples. The aim of these examples is not to do anything useful rather demonstrate how to do simple tasks with the vision of these becoming the basic building blocks of any robot. To aid as many developers as possible regardless of which language they choose to build robots with we have made every example bilingual providing code in Java and Python.

If you find a feature that you have struggled with or think there is a guide missing from our section why not contact us with your suggestions.

Blippy

If you are new to wave development or new to the v2 API this is the place to start. Blippy demonstrates how to do simple blip operations and respond to user driven events

Deletey

There are always instances when you need to delete blips. Deletey is a simple example of how to do this

Formy

Forms in Google Wave can make a robot really useful. Formy adds a range of form items to wave and them retrieves the user entered content from the form

Participanty

Actioning a wave on behalf of a user? Check out participanty! It demonstrates how to reply on behalf of someone else

Picturey

Spice up waves with some images. Take a peek at picturey

Updatey

The most requested feature for the new API was the ability to update waves without user interaction. Updatey sets the framework for this. It’s a little more advanced than the other guides here but worth a look