Google Wave Robots Get Smarter

Google Wave generated a great deal of hype before being made available to a larger number of users last year, but, as more people got to play around with it, the anticipation veined and was replaced mostly by disappointment. Still, the tool has some potential and Google is still working hard on bringing out the best in it. Now, it's got a brand-new, v. 2.0, Robots API, which comes with a bunch of new features and functionality benefiting the developers and, ultimately, the users.

One of the main selling points of Google Wave is the ability for developers to create new apps and functionality inside a wave. Developers can create two types of apps for Wave, gadgets that are similar to other types of plugins, extensions or widgets available in plenty of products and services. They are stand-alone apps that live inside a wave. Robots, on the other hand, are actual participants to the wave, almost like any other user, which can be directed to perform certain actions within the wave.

The biggest new feature in the Robots API 2.0 is the Active API, which enables developers to create pre-programmed responses to certain external events. This removes the need for the Cron API, which was used to create timed and repeated actions in advance and it enables developers to create actions based on things like stock reports, weather or any other external source of information.

Other improvements come from the Context and Filtering APIs, which enable developers to alter their robots to respond only to certain events and retrieve only the information that is strictly needed, conserving valuable bandwidth. The new tools available to developers should provide an improved experience and, while they won't revive interest in Wave by themselves, with continued improvements and polishing, the communications platform may begin to take shape and become the tool that it set out to be in the first place.

The highlights of the Robots API 2.0 are:

- Active API: In v2, robots can now push information into waves (without having to wait to respond to a user action).
- Context: Robots can now more precisely specify how much information they want to get back from a particular event.
- Filtering: In a similar way, with this new API, the robot can specify what events it needs to respond to, conserving valuable bandwidth.
- Error reporting: Robots are now able to register to receive errors about failed operations.
- Proxying-For: Robots can now convey to Google Wave that their actions are actually on behalf of a different user, via the proxyingFor field.