Google Wave will not die entirely: it will reshape into the app

Google reported last week that while it plans to discontinue its Wave service it will save Google Wave as a stand-alone application. The service will lose its integration with Gmail, but will still give active Wave participants a place to use and modify new and existing Wave’s after the service shuts down at the end of the year.

In the blogpost Google said: “We will expand upon the 200K lines of code we've already open sourced (detailed at waveprotocol.org) to flesh out the existing example Wave server and web client into a more complete application or "Wave in a Box."

This project will include:

• an application bundle including a server and web client supporting real-time collaboration using the same structured conversations as the Google Wave system
• a fast and fully-featured wave panel in the web client with complete support for threaded conversations
• a persistent wave store and search implementation for the server (building on contributed patches to implement a MongoDB store)
• refinements to the client-server protocols
• gadget, robot and data API support
• support for importing wave data from wave.google.com
• the ability to federate across other Wave in a Box instances, with some additional configuration

Google further says: “This project will not have the full functionality of Google Wave as you know it today. However, we intend to give developers and enterprising users an opportunity to run wave servers and host waves on their own hardware.”