Write Your First Google Wave Robot in Java : Page 4

Problems Encountered During Wave Robot Development

When I develop Wave robots, I run into two general kinds of problems:

1. Slow development cycles caused by the inability to test Wave event/robot interactions locally
2. Changing Wave APIs and my robots sometimes not receiving event notifications, both due to the Wave platform's beta status

Neither of these problems is a showstopper, however. Because Wave robots are in effect a web service, I test the application code for these services locally. That way, when I start doing test deployments, I usually have to deal only with problems I encounter with the Wave platform itself. So, test locally as much as possible because the App Engine platform's build/deploy/test cycle takes a few minutes.

You can sometimes deal with the Wave service problems by being patient. If I initiate a Wave event (i.e., create a new Wave and add my robot) and the event does not show up in the App Engine console app logs, I usually just work on anther project and retry my tests later. As the Wave platform becomes more stable, this will likely become unnecessary.

Take the Next Step

You should now be ready to use the Google Wave platform as an additional publishing and deployment platform. Figure 1 and Figure 2 at the beginning of the article also showed Facebook as an additional publishing platform for your existing web applications. After you have used the example in this article to publish one of your web applications as a Wave robot, you could try to publish it as a Facebook application by following these simple steps (if you have not already done so).

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