Google Wave Fun

After a long time waiting, I finally got an Google Wave invitation this week - just as I was starting to look forward to a work slowdown so I could start programming again in the evenings.  The call of playing with a new toy was enough motivation to overcome inertia and spend a few hours, here and there in the evening, in order to create a new "gadget".  Google Wave Gadgets are actually fairly easy to create.  The only downside (from my point of view) is that they have to be written using javascript instead of Python.  Since this blog is called "Only Python", you may wonder how a post about a Google Wave Gadget could possibly belong here.  Believe me, it does.

A few years ago, in order to learn programming in Python, I created a "Karel the Robot" application in Python, to teach/learn Python, called rur-ple.  rur-ple was actually inspired by Guido van Robot (or GvR) which uses a Python like language.

I thought it would be a good idea to have something like rur-ple as a wave gadget.  Rather than re-inventing the wheel, I contacted Paul Carduner, who wrote gvr-online, and suggested that we could collaborate on a gadget - and he agreed.  The end goal is to have something like gvr-online as a gadget, but one which would recognize both the traditional GvR syntax OR the Python syntax used with rur-ple, as a choice for the end user.

The idea of having something like gvr-online as a wave gadget is the following: a teacher can embed such a gadget in a wave, with a predefined world, and assign it as a problem to either one, or more students - who could collaborate in that wave. All wave participants, including the teacher, can thus contribute and help each other.

Having had the idea, I wrote what was basically an empty shell of a gadget which Paul quickly connected to the existing code for gvr-online.  Some minor work remained for me to do to enable shared states and, apart from a minor UI bug, the prototype is now working.  What's left to do includes incorporation the Python syntax as an alternative to the traditional GvR syntax.

For those that might be interested in such a gadget, I suggest you first check gvr-online itself to get a better idea of what it does.  Then, if you have a Google Wave account, you can embed the gadget in a wave using this link.  Note that this is our "work in progress" link, that should not be expected to be a permanent one.