Thoughts on the federation protocol interop
Andrew Hyatt
So, the federation protocol is working, at least to the Wave Sandbox.
It works, but requires a certificate and is evidently a little tricky
to set up.
I talked to some of the Federations guys to understand what this means
for this integration. Obviously users of this package cannot be
expected to have a real certificate just to connect to wave. What
they suggested is that eventually there will be a FedOne that is
hosted, and all that we would need to run are clients. I'm not sure
when that will happen (it seems like FedOne would need to implement
authentication first), but this seems to be our path to integration.
A client/server protocol may eventually appear, and when Wave supports
that, this emacs project could eventually use it. But that could be a
year or more before that happens. I'd like to get something working
sooner than that.
An alternate possibility I proposed was for us to instead integrate
against the exiting JSON API (the one Google Wave actually uses).
This is tricky. Not only would we have to implement OT, but we'd also
have to take care and maintain all Waves in a valid state. It is all
possible to do, but perhaps tricky.
What I propose is to continue working with the FedOne client to
develop the UI more. Like I've said before, we can always swap out
the interface layer for something better. I don't particularly like
having to be dependent on the Wave team opening up a FedOne server for
us, but it's definitely the easiest solution.
I'd love to hedge, though, and branch off and see how much we can
working with the JSON API. That might be a task for when I (or some
other intrepid developer) have a significant chunk of free time.
Thoughts and opinions will be appreciated.