Thoughts on Google Wave

Lately I received an invitation to Google Wave from a colleague at the otto group (btw, thanks for that, David).

First I thought, that Wave is another way of spending my precious time. Some people say, that Google just tries to revolutionize the communication tool market with its Google Wave application and are curios if that will work given the set of existing communication tools with their broad feature set. Beside that some point out that the feature of adding arbitrary content at any location within a wave could discourage non-digital natives from using the new technology.

I fully agree that Google tries again to revolutionize a market, but I disagree with the implicated estimation that Google just adds another communication tool. Although Wave is still in beta mode, it is already visible what the driving force behind the scene is. Google does not provide us with another isolated publishing pipe like Twitter or alike but enhances our way of information exchange by combining different communication channels into an integrated application.

From my point of view, one of the main problems with today's communication tools is the fact that some of them are very famous but none of them really maps the real life way of conversation into the digital world. That again leaves us with sometimes fragmented conversations that are unnecessarily protracted because the exchanged textual informations (for the case of an email) do not fully explain the intentions of the participants. In real life we tend to support such situations with additional material from different sources, eg. maps or photos, to clarify our statements.

Google actually tries to solve what I expressed in my last statement: support a conversation with information from a variety of sources. Make no mistake about the hype Google created around Wave, the application is still under development and has more the feeling of a very active research project than an enterprise enabled communication tool. But if you strip down the initial character of its current state (by 17/12/2009) you must realize that Google heralds a new era of compelling messaging experience as for example Mozilla also tries do achieve with its Raindrop project.

Finally neither the Google nor the Mozilla approach will help us today to avoid the face-off with situations like Frank Schirrmacher wrote about: he complained that his head cannot follow the constant flow of information anymore (see www.spiegel.de, german only). But on the other hand they help us to steer into the right direction. A very tiny but important step is the traceability of a Waves conversation history which does not only help the non-digital natives to find out when a certain piece of information was inserted into a conversation and by whom.

Hourglass display with Richfaces

Hourglass display with Richfaces

Yesterday we started with a preliminary application test to be prepared for the final integration test next month.
Since the web based application works on large datasets which could sometimes lead to extended response times at
frontend level, one of the first things the users asked for, were a hourglass or something alike to show that the
server is still processing the request.

Since the application is based on Richfaces I searched for any feature that could help me and discovered the status tag.

The first thing I wanted to try out, was to display a message simply informing the user that the current request is still in processing mode. In order to do so, only two things needs to be done:

• Define the message display behaviour using the status tag


• Bind the status handler to a control that sends an ajax request to the backend


<a4j:status id="testStatus" startText="Request processing started" stopText="Request processing ended"/>
<a4j:commandButton action=".." value=".." status="testStatus"/>


The next time the user clicks on the command button a message will appear and inform him about the processing state.

Well, that kind of behaviour gives your users a slight hint on what the system is currently doing, but hey, an overlay graphic displaying a hourglass or alike is much cooler, isn't it. Therefore I continued to search for an appropriate solution to that
problem and finally found one written by Markus Kühle (in german only). Compared to my little example above, the main concept does not change. A status handler is defined as well as the binding with the command button. In order to create an overlay message, we need to work with cascade style sheets:


* html body { margin: 0; overflow-y: hidden; padding: 0; }

#globalStatusDiv {
position: relative;
left: 50%;
top: 200px;
width: 100px;

text-align: center;
margin-left: -50px;
height: 25px;
line-height: 25px;
background-color: #FFF;
padding: 2px 15px 2px 10px;
color: #000;
font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: bold;
z-index: 10000;
}

#globalStatusDiv img {
vertical-align: middle;
}


Next, we must define a div which contains the information to be displayed and bind it to a status tag:


<link href="/css/status.css" rel="stylesheet" />
<div id="globalStatusDiv" style="display:none;">
<img src="/images/working.gif"/> %<h:outputText value="#{generalMsg.general_loading_message}"/>
</div>
<a4j:status id="globalWaitStatus" forceId="true" layout="none"
onstart="jQuery('#globalStatusDiv').fadeIn('fast')"
onstop="jQuery('#globalStatusDiv').fadeOut('slow')" />


The binding with a command button does not differ from the simple example above:


<a4j:commandButton action=".." value=".." status="globalWaitStatus"/>