Technology Melting Pot
In the fast paced and ever changing industry of web technologies, words like collaboration tend to get overloaded and the result is often confusion. During our evangelism around the concepts of the Cooperative Web, we have received many questions about the relationship between Project Blue Spruce (PBS), Google Wave, Telepresence and Instant Messaging solutions. While all of these technologies pertain to unified communications and collaboration, they each serve unique scenarios under the collaboration umbrella and in some cases they can actually co-exist and/or interoperate.
Collaborative Scenarios
A core technology enabler for many collaborative scenarios is an open source XML based messaging protocol for presence and real-time communication called XMPP. Several collaborative solutions for unified communications use XMPP as an underlying messaging protocol. However, aside from this common underpinning these solutions diverge in the manner in which XMPP is used and in the overall purpose of the solution. Some example deployments of XMPP are:
In the fast paced and ever changing industry of web technologies, words like collaboration tend to get overloaded and the result is often confusion. During our evangelism around the concepts of the Cooperative Web, we have received many questions about the relationship between Project Blue Spruce (PBS), Google Wave, Telepresence and Instant Messaging solutions. While all of these technologies pertain to unified communications and collaboration, they each serve unique scenarios under the collaboration umbrella and in some cases they can actually co-exist and/or interoperate.
Collaborative Scenarios
A core technology enabler for many collaborative scenarios is an open source XML based messaging protocol for presence and real-time communication called XMPP. Several collaborative solutions for unified communications use XMPP as an underlying messaging protocol. However, aside from this common underpinning these solutions diverge in the manner in which XMPP is used and in the overall purpose of the solution. Some example deployments of XMPP are:
- Instant Messaging (IM): Text chat clients may use XMPP as the messaging protocol for real-time text conversations. While XMPP enables presence and asynchronous text chat to unified communications, the overall user experience is very limited. From a Teleprence perspective, IM solutions for collaboration do not address any of the key human sensory elements - sight, sound, touch.
- Google Wave: Google Wave clients use XMPP as the messaging protocol to maintain threaded conversations. XMPP helps to provide asynchronous updates to a live XML document object, called a wave, that is targeted at the next generation of collaboration platforms (email, IM, blogging, etc). Wave has been proposed as an open source project. The Google Wave platform is a rich enhancement to the web browser experience. However, from a Telepresence perspective Google Wave addresses only the manipulation (touch) aspects of a telepresence solution. While conversation participants can simultaneously interact with a shared document object, the conversation is not time boxed and participants do not experience all of the aspects of a real meeting environment.
- IBM Project Blue Spruce: Web applications can be used in a co-web enabled environment whereby XMPP messages are used to maintain application state and to communicate simultaneous user interactions within a web meeting. As a reference implementation of the Cooperative Web, PBS provides a virtual meeting environment using the common web browser. Users join a meeting by pointing their browser to a specific meeting URL. This URL represents a co-web enabled application. Each meeting participant is viewing an independent instance of the web application (URL). Typically, these web applications will include vchat and data components thereby addressing all three human sensory elements of a physical meeting. As users interact with data, web events are transmitted via XMPP messages to each of the participants. Each participant's browser will simultaneous process the events and thereby keep all participants in sync with the state of the meeting. XMPP is one possible enabler for co-web functionality. However, PBS can also use websockets, comet (ajax-push: real-time data streaming) and other technology underpinnings as the transport for co-web events.
Technology Interoperability Demo
The associated video offers a brief glimpse into how PBS can interoperate with IM and Google Wave Clients. A simple example would be the use of instant messaging as a mechanism for inviting people to a meeting. In PBS this would be accomplished by sending the IM invitee the URL to the meeting to join and the Wave invitee would receive a Wave document.
Melting Pot Harmony
While PBS and Wave share common underpinnings such as XMPP, PBS is focused on the Telepresence industry while Wave is focused on providing a new open source object model, protocol and platform for conversation threads. Towards this end, Wave objects can be injected into PBS applications and a PBS server could (if desired) incorporate the Wave Protocol and API. Essentially, a PBS application could (where necessary) be a Wave Client. So complimentary integration of the technologies is possible given appropriate solution requirements. PBS is a framework for creating cooperative web enabled web applications. Any web application that can view a Wave Entity (wave or wavelet) is considered a Google Wave client application. Such applications can be enabled for use in a cooperative web environment like PBS.
The associated video offers a brief glimpse into how PBS can interoperate with IM and Google Wave Clients. A simple example would be the use of instant messaging as a mechanism for inviting people to a meeting. In PBS this would be accomplished by sending the IM invitee the URL to the meeting to join and the Wave invitee would receive a Wave document.
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Melting Pot Harmony
While PBS and Wave share common underpinnings such as XMPP, PBS is focused on the Telepresence industry while Wave is focused on providing a new open source object model, protocol and platform for conversation threads. Towards this end, Wave objects can be injected into PBS applications and a PBS server could (if desired) incorporate the Wave Protocol and API. Essentially, a PBS application could (where necessary) be a Wave Client. So complimentary integration of the technologies is possible given appropriate solution requirements. PBS is a framework for creating cooperative web enabled web applications. Any web application that can view a Wave Entity (wave or wavelet) is considered a Google Wave client application. Such applications can be enabled for use in a cooperative web environment like PBS.
