Google Wave Robots – Dude Approved.
Thaaaats right dude, google wave is here. I got my invite last week, and tonight was the first night I really got to play with it so I decided to write a little wave robot. I had no idea how easy/difficult it would be so I made something simple.
Enter THE DUDE-Y!
Google Wave Robots have so far started a naming convention that includes a cutesy name ending in a -y. Spelly. Trippy. Tweety. So I felt it was only natural that I create The Dude-y. The Dude-y simply notices keywords and responds to them with some canned responses. Which, btw, are all Big Lebowski quotes, which of course makes those boring waves much more freaking hilarious. I am sure Wave will be the life changing experience that we all hope it will be, when people are on it, but for now…..frankly its kinda boring.
As for the technical stuff, writing a wave robot is pretty simple. I have been hacking on GWT programs for a while now, and writing a robot nearly identical. In fact, for someone already using the Google App Engine for their GWT apps, writing a robot is dead easy.
I followed this tutorial, which basically says blahblahblah, extend AbstractRobotServlet, blahblahblah, listen to processEvents blahblahblah. The only part I found even slightly difficult was figuring out how to get an icon for my robot. Using the java client library, you have to make another servlet extended from ProfileServlet which responds to getRobotAvatarUrl, and returns the url of your icon (100×100 png) file. Then just put that file inside your war and deploy it. OF COURSE, don’t forget to add the new servlet to your web.xml! Just check out any of the examples in the wave robot example gallery for how to do this.
The last thing to be aware of is versioning. As I responded to the BLIP_SUBMITTED message apparently it had my old version of the robot cached in wave. So I needed to increment the version number in the capabilities.xml file. In fact, I think it even didn’t work the first time I incremented it, but after playing with it a bit, it eventually was updated. Not sure if there is an issue there, or if it was my own dam fault.
Anyway, you can play with THE DUDE-Y by adding his email to your wave:
thedude-y@appspot.com
Btw, nice marmot.