As many of you know,  Google Wave has an API that enterprising developers can use to create their own bots and extensions. I have recently started playing around with it, so here is my short introduction to it.

At the time of this writing, the Google Wave API is supported only for Java and Python. Google seems to be supporting Python a lot, and apparently a large amount of their infrastructure is implemented in it. Java support seems to have been added mainly due to its popularity.

I am sure that other programming languages will be supported soon, either by Google itself, or by third parties providing wrappers.

Although I am a Java programmer, I have decided to use Python for my own projects, partially as a challenge, and partially because I think that the Python API is more likwly to be better tested.

From my reading, the bot API is very much event driven, basically bot writing seems to consist of writing event handlers for events such as people joining the wave, blips getting edited, etc. Apparently the first blip is treated differently from the rest of them, which is something I will have to keep in mind as I work on my Uberbot.

At the moment, all Google Wave apps need to be hosted with Google, on the appspot.com domain, although I hear that there are plans to allow other apps at some point in the future. To do so, you will need to get a Google App Engine account. You will also be limited to 10 apps on an account.

For more information, you might want to read the Wave API FAQ. So far, I have worked through the bot creation tutorial, and it works fine, but due to personal issues, I have yet to actually write any code of my own, I will post the occasional update as I work on my bot, and hopefully unveil it next year.

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