CountColon – my first Google Wave robot

CountColon – a robot that adds text statistics to your blips

This is my first Google Wave robot ^^ Just got access to the Google Wave sandbox yesterday (finally!).

There don’t even seem to be that many robots and gadgets yet. All in all there are about 50 gadgets and robots on the official list, so my robot is one of the very first add-ons for Google Wave (yay).

I like the feature that many text editors (at least the good ones) have which shows you statistics about your documents. Stuff like line count, word count, character count and so forth. Google Wave doesn’t have that and nobody (at least not that I know of ^^) wrote a robot that adds this functionality to Wave,  so I did it myself ^^ Was easy enough too which is good since I only know the little bit about Python that I learnt when I started working on a website that runs on Google App Engine.

Here’s how it works (for now):

You write [count: lines] or [count: words] anywhere in your text and then the robot swaps it with the count. That way, you can style the output like you want. You can also do [count: chars] to count characters and I plan to add paragraph counting next. And then I’ll make a command that lets you count occurrences of a word or phrase ^^ And THEN I will make an option that lets the counters update live (at the moment they only update exactly… Once ^^).

Developing robots isn’t that easy right now for two reasons. The documentation is incomplete (and that’s a nice word for it ^^) and you can’t test robots locally which means that you have to develop your robot, upload it to Google App Engine, add it to a Wave in Google Wave, check your App Engine logs for error messages, change your code, upload your code again, …

Also the Python API seems to be missing a few features that the Java API already offers (I haven’t looked at the Java API yet). You can’t for example modify styled text (bold, italic, etc.) with the Python API which means that if you do modify text with a robot written in Python, all styles are lost. I learnt that the hard way with my robot

It’s a lot of fun though ^^ I already have ideas for 5 more projects (robots and gadgets) and I’m sure I’ll get a couple more ideas over the next weeks.

I’ll write about my experience with Wave in another blog post.

Google App Engine

Since Google Wave robots can only be deployed on Google App Engine websites right now and because App Engine is free until your website should be big enough to make enough money to pay for the website (which is awesome), I started to learn website development with/for Google App Engine.

After about 15 minutes of reading through the documentation I was ready to write the website for my Google Wave project. I’m lazy so that was pretty neat. After 10 hours of working on it, the site is almost done now, including a basic design that should do for now (I’ll add some Javascript stuff next). I used the small, basic web framework that comes with Google App Engine because I didn’t feel like learning Django, usually I use Ruby on Rails for websites and before that I developed with PHP for 5 years. I did look at the Java stuff for Google App Engine but that looked way too complicated, it would have taken me much more time to get started with that, never made anything web-ish with Java. I’ll probably look into that some more in the future though. I’m probably also going to look into Django when I find the time. I did go through a Django tutorial a year or so ago but I don’t remember that much of it

I hacked through the night and up till noon, it was really fun to work with Google App Engine. I had a bit of trouble because some stuff that the web framework can do that I needed isn’t even mentioned in the documentation but I figured it out eventually. I’ll probably post a few code snippets that could potentially be a lot of help to others that use the web framework that comes with Google App Engine.