RSC Google Wave Phase I: Local installation

Like many others out there I’m interested in Google Wave and the opportunities for communication, collaboration and social learning in education. Followers of my twitter feed will also be aware that I’ve been scrabbling around for an invite to the wave preview site (this is hopefully now in hand thanks to colleagues).

One of the reasons I’m interested in Google Wave is because it isn’t limited to running from one of Google’s own servers. From the very outset Google have laid out their stall, making available the Google Wave Federation Protocol, essentially the building blocks which would enable any organisation to setup and run their own Google Wave service.

The way we intend to support Google Wave within our region is to establish a special interest group (SIG) and host our own Google Wave service to allow staff (both academic and technical) to explore the use of Wave. As Google are still beta testing Wave it will not be until the new year that we will be formally pulling this group together, but this hasn’t stopped us laying some of the groundwork.

Phase I has been to install a local prototype server. Before you get your hopes up and think you can run a fully featured Wave service the current code only allows you to run a very basic client and server (see photo insert above). We are using this phase of the project to explore some of the server side techie bits (it also not necessary to run a prototype server on a Wibrain – it just happened to be the only linux box I had available ;-).

If you would like to try installing your own prototype server my main reference was the Installation Guide on wave-protocol Google code and a screencast by Luc Castera which originally appeared on his dambalah blog in July, embedded below. I’ve also prepared some of my own prototype server installation notes here – enjoy ;-):


Installing the Google Wave Server Reference Implementation from messagepub on Vimeo.

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