WRS - The Next Step

Okay so now that you've got the WRS all setup and federated, you're talking to people around the world with the console client and wondering what to do next.

Well personally I think the next thing to do is have a look at what needs to be added to the WRS to move it beyond "Reference" and into something that can be used to really explore the Wave Concept.

Below is what I think the WRS is going to need and why:

Client:

The WRS needs a web based client for a couple of reasons.

• The Wavesandbox client demonstrates many of the features that make Wave "teh awesome". The text console while good for doing very basic testing cannot replicate many of those features (inline blips anyone? picture pasting?). So in order to demonstrate the real power of hosting your own Wave Server we need a WRC (Wave Reference Client).
• The code of the WRC would need to be able to demonstrate exactly how best to use the existing (and hence defacto standard) protocols for communicating between the server and the client. This will greatly aid in the design of both the future "real standard" as well as new clients, both web and "native".

Persistance:

Currently the WRS has no way of tracking waves beyond the next restart. All information is kept in memory, rather than accessing a RDBMS or other storage method. This means that all information about the current/past waves are lost when you shutdown the server.

Being able to connect the WRS to a storage method would give a much better idea of the requirements for operating your own Wave infrastructure, particularly in terms of performance and hardware required.

User Management:

Similarly, the WRS has no way of validating connecting clients. This means that your WRS is the Wave equivelant of an open relay, allowing anyone to connect and do as they will.

So what the WRS needs is a way to manage those users who are allowed to connect to the server and utelise its services.

Extensions:

I have it on good authority that an extensions layer is being worked on for the WRS which will allow people to build their own Robot/Gadget setups, so I can't wait to see what comes out with that.

So that's a list just off the top of my head, I'm sure there are other features out there that people can think off.

Open Source:

You know what though? We don't have to wait for the guys at Google to build these things. We have the source for the WRS, it's licenses under the Apache Open Source License, this means that we the nascent Wave community have the power to contribute back to the project ourselves. Someone in Lithuania could build a DB backend, while a group in South Africa work on the User Management tool.

Who's up for it?