7 ms·

Apache Wave on Sandstorm.io

142 points by srpeck 12y ago

swah 12y ago
I think you guys are going too fast :)
yalogin 12y ago
I did not understand it then and am still confused. What is this supposed to be - a new workflow? a new UI? a new paradigm to do something? Every discussion or webpage I see about this talks about mail. Is it applicable to any other application?
- jaimeyap 12y ago
  The end game I think for sandstorm is the equivalent of a rich AppStore/Marketplace for web apps and web services. Instead of installing an App on your phone. You would install some service on a personal server. Without needing to be a technical person who understands configuring servers. And for technical users, you can have one-click installs for apps that you know are secure, sandboxed against your other apps and more. And for App writers, you have an API surface area that makes it easy to do authentication, sharing, etc... There are lots of things to like here. And a lot of opportunity given how much richer an experience an actual persistent web server can offer over a traditional client app install. (I am not affiliated with Sandstorm. Just dig the vision, and think that Kenton and his crew are pretty awesome engineers who can pull it off.) Edit: Re-reading your post, I think you might have been talking about Wave and not Sandstorm :). Whoops. My bad :P.
- wmf 12y ago
  I saw Wave as a wiki that's real-time. Whether wikis benefit from being real-time is an open question.
  - yeukhon 12y ago
    To me that's what IRC is for. You need a structure in Wave to make it useful as a realtime wiki. That's what etherpad is for and people then copy and paste the content into a wiki page later(etherpad is not good for continuous editing FYI so you should never edit the same Etherpad every day. It's a great way for realtime collaboration but ephemeral. You can also use Google Docs too).
    - ytjohn 12y ago
      Google Wave was actually inspired by EtherPad and Google ended up purchasing AppJet so that they could have the EtherPad engineers work on Wave.
- kentonv 12y ago
  As I mentioned in the blog post, one use case for Wave that I personally find compelling is design discussions. If I post a design proposal (e.g. for a new Sandstorm feature) as a Wave, people can comment on individual pieces without the discussion turning into a mess. Wave is really just a different kind of real-time collaborative document editing that extends documents into discussions rather than just flat blobs of text.
- vanderZwan 12y ago
  From what I recall, a few of my friends actively used it back in the day at work, and they claimed it was fantastic for remote collaborations.
  - viraptor 12y ago
    I used it for 2 projects at uni and enjoyed it a lot. Then it slowed down so much it was unbearable and we couldn't really discover how far the improvements go. Maybe it would get a better response from general public if the modern browsers / js engines were available then.
  - rodgerd 12y ago
    Wave was also incredibly popular for doing pencil-and-paper RPGs online.
- skybrian 12y ago
  If you're asking what Wave is, you can think of it as collaborative document sharing and commenting (like Google Docs) but with a different document type that supports threaded discussions similar to many online forums. Wave also had its own email-like inbox for reading updated documents, and was marketed as improved email but it never really worked well for that. These days I use Google Docs with commenting enabled for the sort of thing we used Wave for.
  - api 12y ago
    Not necessarily dissing Wave, but when I first saw it years ago (when it was a Google product) my first thought was "this is like 4chan enterprise!" :)
    - walterbell 12y ago
      What did Wave have in common with 4chan?
hexagonsun 12y ago
neat animated logo
iluvyc 12y ago
How different is sandstorm from Tonido personal cloud platform?
chrionsr 12y ago
looks cool!
ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
Wave was a great idea that was completely misunderstood. Unfortunately, it also seemed to have been misunderstood by the people who designed it. Wave was supposed to be a collaborative replacement for email built on the then-exciting XMPP protocol. It was marketed poorly, misunderstood, and eventually shitcanned because Google had no idea what to do with it.
- spindritf 12y ago
  The web client wasn't good enough, too. It would start lagging at ~200 posts which wasn't that many in an active multi-threaded discussion between three-four people. Which is a shame because I liked Wave a lot.
  - Turing_Machine 12y ago
    Agreed. I liked the idea a lot and enjoyed using it while it lasted. The lag sucked, though. Just when the discussion would start to get interesting, it would slooooowwwww dowwwwwwn.
- astrange 12y ago
  What was exciting about the XMPP protocol itself? Were people back then just excited to be in the presence of vast amounts of XML? I mean, that'd explain a lot. I felt like Wave very closely approached something useful in this space, but almost anything in communications is interesting when you have another person to talk to, and very little is interesting without one. That makes it very hard to judge if the platform is helping or not.
  - ianstallings 12y ago
    There was no IM standard at the time. Every provider had their own standard and most of the IM software was not open sourced. Jabber changed the playing field.
    - ocdtrekkie 12y ago
applecore 12y ago
Wave was a promising idea, but it looks like Slack[1] has become the de facto platform for team communication. [1]: https://slack.com https://slack.com
- spankalee 12y ago
  Never head of Slack. Their site doesn't even describe what it is.
  - applecore 12y ago
    Slack is a collaborative tool for document sharing and communication. You can learn more about what Slack is here: https://slack.com/is https://slack.com/is
  - tapoxi 12y ago
    It's a HipChat clone.
    - __P 12y ago
      Except it's 10x better than hipchat in almost every way. Price, funcationality, interop, apis, permissions, etc...
    - aidenn0 12y ago
      What's HipChat?
  - mcfunley 12y ago
    IRC on the web with tons of work-relevant integrations. And an easy API, emojis, searchable history, etc. It's great.
- ocdtrekkie 12y ago
  Honestly, it kinda scares me how many companies are willing to transmit and store proprietary corporate data over random cloud services these days.
brainburn 12y ago
I think where Google messed up was requiring invites for Wave. Pretty hard to get people on board when they first have to scrounge to get an invite to something they do not quite understand. Network effect--; It could have been so big and awesome. I'm sure after a while the speed issues would have been ironed out.
- takeda 12y ago
  Second issue they had was scalability of the service and I suspect the invite system was probably implemented to give them time to scale it. On some large subjects with many people contributing the service was practically unusable.
- VikingCoder 12y ago
  In an alternate universe: I think where Google messed up was letting everyone try it on day one. Pretty hard to get on board when day one is just laggy and chaotic. Performance--; It could have been so big and awesome. I'm sure after a while the speed issues would have been ironed out.
- mseebach 12y ago
  ... made even more absurd by the fact that it is a collaboration platform. I actually at the time collaborated on some large, complex documents, but the people I did it with weren't on Wave.
mark_l_watson 12y ago
I liked Wave as a Google product, and I like Apache Wave self hosted. I have tried getting friends and family interested in using a self hosted instance, but not much interest. They like Facebook, go figure :-) That said, a self hosted Apache Wave to small teams seems like a good tool for collaboration.
avdempsey 12y ago
Wave wasn't just laggy, it was frequently down. All sorts of apps with scaling issues can work better with the Sandstorm model. The whole Sandstorm idea really started clicking for me when I read one of their earlier posts on motivations: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-apps-require-federated-hosting.html https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-ap... That made me a backer.
- kentonv 12y ago
  Thank you!
- ende42 12y ago
  Good read, thanks. Is it possible to run an own, modified version of an open source app on sandstorm.io? As a non-techie user? Like - say - a small modification of Wordpress?
  - dwrensha 12y ago
    Yep. You could fork our WordPress port[1], repackage it as your own app, and run it on any Sandstorm server. [1] https://github.com/dwrensha/wordpress-sandstorm https://github.com/dwrensha/wordpress-sandstorm
wiradikusuma 12y ago
People keep mentioning how Wave would start lagging as you use it more. Is this still a known issue or has it been fixed?
blueskin_ 12y ago
Wave still seems like a solution in search of a problem to me.

142 points by srpeck 12y ago

swah 12y ago

I think you guys are going too fast :)

I did not understand it then and am still confused. What is this supposed to be - a new workflow? a new UI? a new paradigm to do something? Every discussion or webpage I see about this talks about mail. Is it applicable to any other application?

jaimeyap 12y ago
The end game I think for sandstorm is the equivalent of a rich AppStore/Marketplace for web apps and web services. Instead of installing an App on your phone. You would install some service on a personal server. Without needing to be a technical person who understands configuring servers. And for technical users, you can have one-click installs for apps that you know are secure, sandboxed against your other apps and more. And for App writers, you have an API surface area that makes it easy to do authentication, sharing, etc... There are lots of things to like here. And a lot of opportunity given how much richer an experience an actual persistent web server can offer over a traditional client app install. (I am not affiliated with Sandstorm. Just dig the vision, and think that Kenton and his crew are pretty awesome engineers who can pull it off.) Edit: Re-reading your post, I think you might have been talking about Wave and not Sandstorm :). Whoops. My bad :P.
wmf 12y ago
I saw Wave as a wiki that's real-time. Whether wikis benefit from being real-time is an open question.
- yeukhon 12y ago
  To me that's what IRC is for. You need a structure in Wave to make it useful as a realtime wiki. That's what etherpad is for and people then copy and paste the content into a wiki page later(etherpad is not good for continuous editing FYI so you should never edit the same Etherpad every day. It's a great way for realtime collaboration but ephemeral. You can also use Google Docs too).
  - ytjohn 12y ago
    Google Wave was actually inspired by EtherPad and Google ended up purchasing AppJet so that they could have the EtherPad engineers work on Wave.
kentonv 12y ago
As I mentioned in the blog post, one use case for Wave that I personally find compelling is design discussions. If I post a design proposal (e.g. for a new Sandstorm feature) as a Wave, people can comment on individual pieces without the discussion turning into a mess. Wave is really just a different kind of real-time collaborative document editing that extends documents into discussions rather than just flat blobs of text.
vanderZwan 12y ago
From what I recall, a few of my friends actively used it back in the day at work, and they claimed it was fantastic for remote collaborations.
- viraptor 12y ago
  I used it for 2 projects at uni and enjoyed it a lot. Then it slowed down so much it was unbearable and we couldn't really discover how far the improvements go. Maybe it would get a better response from general public if the modern browsers / js engines were available then.
- rodgerd 12y ago
  Wave was also incredibly popular for doing pencil-and-paper RPGs online.
skybrian 12y ago
If you're asking what Wave is, you can think of it as collaborative document sharing and commenting (like Google Docs) but with a different document type that supports threaded discussions similar to many online forums. Wave also had its own email-like inbox for reading updated documents, and was marketed as improved email but it never really worked well for that. These days I use Google Docs with commenting enabled for the sort of thing we used Wave for.
- api 12y ago
  Not necessarily dissing Wave, but when I first saw it years ago (when it was a Google product) my first thought was "this is like 4chan enterprise!" :)
  - walterbell 12y ago
    What did Wave have in common with 4chan?

hexagonsun 12y ago

neat animated logo

iluvyc 12y ago

How different is sandstorm from Tonido personal cloud platform?

chrionsr 12y ago

looks cool!

ChikkaChiChi 12y ago

Wave was a great idea that was completely misunderstood. Unfortunately, it also seemed to have been misunderstood by the people who designed it. Wave was supposed to be a collaborative replacement for email built on the then-exciting XMPP protocol. It was marketed poorly, misunderstood, and eventually shitcanned because Google had no idea what to do with it.

spindritf 12y ago
The web client wasn't good enough, too. It would start lagging at ~200 posts which wasn't that many in an active multi-threaded discussion between three-four people. Which is a shame because I liked Wave a lot.
- Turing_Machine 12y ago
  Agreed. I liked the idea a lot and enjoyed using it while it lasted. The lag sucked, though. Just when the discussion would start to get interesting, it would slooooowwwww dowwwwwwn.
astrange 12y ago
What was exciting about the XMPP protocol itself? Were people back then just excited to be in the presence of vast amounts of XML? I mean, that'd explain a lot. I felt like Wave very closely approached something useful in this space, but almost anything in communications is interesting when you have another person to talk to, and very little is interesting without one. That makes it very hard to judge if the platform is helping or not.
- ianstallings 12y ago
  There was no IM standard at the time. Every provider had their own standard and most of the IM software was not open sourced. Jabber changed the playing field.
  - ocdtrekkie 12y ago

applecore 12y ago

Wave was a promising idea, but it looks like Slack[1] has become the de facto platform for team communication. [1]: https://slack.com https://slack.com

spankalee 12y ago
Never head of Slack. Their site doesn't even describe what it is.
- applecore 12y ago
  Slack is a collaborative tool for document sharing and communication. You can learn more about what Slack is here: https://slack.com/is https://slack.com/is
- tapoxi 12y ago
  It's a HipChat clone.
  - __P 12y ago
    Except it's 10x better than hipchat in almost every way. Price, funcationality, interop, apis, permissions, etc...
  - aidenn0 12y ago
    What's HipChat?
- mcfunley 12y ago
  IRC on the web with tons of work-relevant integrations. And an easy API, emojis, searchable history, etc. It's great.
ocdtrekkie 12y ago
Honestly, it kinda scares me how many companies are willing to transmit and store proprietary corporate data over random cloud services these days.

brainburn 12y ago

I think where Google messed up was requiring invites for Wave. Pretty hard to get people on board when they first have to scrounge to get an invite to something they do not quite understand. Network effect--; It could have been so big and awesome. I'm sure after a while the speed issues would have been ironed out.

takeda 12y ago
Second issue they had was scalability of the service and I suspect the invite system was probably implemented to give them time to scale it. On some large subjects with many people contributing the service was practically unusable.
VikingCoder 12y ago
In an alternate universe: I think where Google messed up was letting everyone try it on day one. Pretty hard to get on board when day one is just laggy and chaotic. Performance--; It could have been so big and awesome. I'm sure after a while the speed issues would have been ironed out.
mseebach 12y ago
... made even more absurd by the fact that it is a collaboration platform. I actually at the time collaborated on some large, complex documents, but the people I did it with weren't on Wave.

mark_l_watson 12y ago

I liked Wave as a Google product, and I like Apache Wave self hosted. I have tried getting friends and family interested in using a self hosted instance, but not much interest. They like Facebook, go figure :-) That said, a self hosted Apache Wave to small teams seems like a good tool for collaboration.

avdempsey 12y ago

Wave wasn't just laggy, it was frequently down. All sorts of apps with scaling issues can work better with the Sandstorm model. The whole Sandstorm idea really started clicking for me when I read one of their earlier posts on motivations: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-apps-require-federated-hosting.html https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-ap... That made me a backer.

kentonv 12y ago
Thank you!
ende42 12y ago
Good read, thanks. Is it possible to run an own, modified version of an open source app on sandstorm.io? As a non-techie user? Like - say - a small modification of Wordpress?
- dwrensha 12y ago
  Yep. You could fork our WordPress port[1], repackage it as your own app, and run it on any Sandstorm server. [1] https://github.com/dwrensha/wordpress-sandstorm https://github.com/dwrensha/wordpress-sandstorm

wiradikusuma 12y ago

People keep mentioning how Wave would start lagging as you use it more. Is this still a known issue or has it been fixed?

blueskin_ 12y ago

Wave still seems like a solution in search of a problem to me.