It’s been over a month since I’ve written about Google Wave servers, mostly because I’ve been distracted by my new Nokia N900. However, some recent emails brought me back to looking at Google Wave.

When most people think about Google Wave, they tend to think of Google’s Wave Preview Site. However, Wave is much more than that. There is the Google Wave Protocol and example code that allows people to set up their own Wave Servers as well as create new tools to work with Google Wave.

I’ve been running a Wave Server for quite a while. It is mostly for friends to test with. I’ve connected it to other wave servers, tested out clients, and even tried a little hacking of the software.

Today, I read about a new Google Wave Agent. It is called Probey and provides an http interface to Google Wave servers. I upgraded my server and gave it a try. Currently, it is open in testing mode for anyone that is interested. I am using the default port, 8090, the default userid of foo and the default password of bar.

So, if you want to use Probey to create a new wave on my wave server, you could visit http://foo:bar@orient-lodge.com:8090/new. If Probey is up and running, you should get a message back something like: orient-lodge.com!w+GZ4GMP7r0jIm. This is the wave that you have just created.

You can then add text to that wave by going to http://foo:bar@orient-lodge.com:8090/addblip/orient-lodge.com!w+GZ4GMP7r0jIm/TestMessage. This will add ‘TestMessage’ as a blip to the wave you’ve just created. You will have to change the WaveID to be the one that you created. You should receive a message back, something like b+RQQYaz. That is the id of the blip created. To check to see that the blip has been created, as well as to see any other blips that have been created, you can use the getblip command. i.e http://foo:bar@orient-lodge.com:8090/getblips/orient-lodge.com!w+GZ4GMP7r0jIm. That should show all the blips created for this wave. As a final command, you can also add other people to the wave. So, http://foo:bar@orient-lodge.com:8090/add/orient-lodge.com!w+GZ4GMP7r0jIm/bar@orient-lodge.com would add my test userid, bar@orient-lodge.com to the blip.

The code for Probey looks pretty straight forward, so adding other functionality should be relatively easy. For example, I would love to add a getusers command to see who else is on the wave. Other than that, with a little tweaking and cleanup, it might be possible to use this for two different projects I’m interested in. One is as an http gateway for other systems. As an example, a person could use this to set up a gateway between Second Life and Google Wave. In addition, while it may not be the most efficient way to restore a way and provide persistence between waves, I could see this as a tool to restore old waves.

So, are you testing Google Wave? Got any thoughts on what else could be done to make this a more interesting tool?