In an article called "The secret sauce behind Google Wave" (via onGWT), Gartner Analyst Ray Valdes analyzes OT (Operational Transform), the algorythm that Google Wave uses for doing real-time synchronous editing of a document and conversation in Google Wave.
He did a pretty complete article on the subject, but what is even more interesting for me and XWiki is that he picked up WOOT the algorythm developped by INRIA which is what XWiki Concerto uses at it's core to replicate Wiki on a P2P network. Actually XWiki uses Wooto, and optimized version of WOOT (explained in the PDF here: http://www.inria.fr/rrrt/rr-5580.html)
This is quite cool to see that a similar technology is used in Google Wave. It is very nice to see an implementation on the client side, especially if they publish it as open source as it seems intended.
Seeing Google pick up the need to work at the same time on Wiki style documents and work on conversations at the same time and all this in real-time is great. In the last few years we have worked on multiple technologies to enable this:
- our new XWiki GWT based editor released in XWiki 1.8/1.9 (see in the XWiki 1.9 screencast) which provides quality editing and a plugin architecture allowing to plug-in real time synchronisation, which we have done with an experimental Sync Plugin which we demoed here.
- XWiki Concerto our P2P and Mobile Wiki Research project which uses WOOT to perform Wiki replication.
- XWiki Annotations which allow to comment inline (which are part of the Scribo research project we are working on).
- Integration of Instant messaging in the Wiki for which there is a Google Summer of Code project.
All these principles are also there in Google Wave, and we look forward to see the open-source code to see how we can join the effort and connect our technologies to the technologies and protocols that Google has developped.
Google Wave seems to be a great individual productivity tool which allows to launch and run conversations and integrate more than just messages but documents and application inside the conversation. Now we believe that Wikis have a very big role to play in the mix, as they are needed to really organize the information in the Way the team wants to interact with it. Waves should be inserted and published inside a Wiki so that newcomers can navigate in them in them and that everybody in the team can view the content's organization in the same way. It will be very exciting to see how we can integrate the discussion flow in the process of creating share knowledge.
