Good progress, but not there yet
Feb. 15th, 2011 04:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurJust spent an hour or two doing a quick installation of Wave in a Box, the now open-sourced version of Google Wave. A few thoughts:
On the plus side, installation and setup was astonishingly easy. Admittedly, I'm a couple of years out from the open source world, but it's clear that folks are continuing to make strides in the area of ease of development and use. From a fairly vanilla Windows Server with none of the prerequisites, I had Wave up and running in less than two hours flat, with almost no head-scratching involved. The instructions are clear, and they work. (Which, when dealing with open source on Windows, impresses the heck out of me.)
On the downside, it's not ready for prime time yet, even for limited in-company use. My (admittedly bare) hope was that I could set up an internal Wave server for some project communications that need more depth than email -- someone said, "let's set up a forum system", and I immediately thought of Wave. But the UI still demands Chrome: IE is slow as mud and sadly buggy, so it's clearly still using some of the old Wave client codebase. It's missing a lot of basic UI functionality, including some of the bits I most love about Wave. (Especially the ability to interject a thread into the middle of the base blip.) And unsurprisingly, there's no apparent Active Directory integration yet, which makes use in the corporate environment problematic.
Oh, well -- frankly, it's further along than I expected, and the problems are likely tractable. I'm going to have to deal with something more primitive for my current project, but there's at least plausible reason to hope that, by the time my next one starts up, I'll be able to set up an inside-the-firewall Wave server for its chatter...
On the plus side, installation and setup was astonishingly easy. Admittedly, I'm a couple of years out from the open source world, but it's clear that folks are continuing to make strides in the area of ease of development and use. From a fairly vanilla Windows Server with none of the prerequisites, I had Wave up and running in less than two hours flat, with almost no head-scratching involved. The instructions are clear, and they work. (Which, when dealing with open source on Windows, impresses the heck out of me.)
On the downside, it's not ready for prime time yet, even for limited in-company use. My (admittedly bare) hope was that I could set up an internal Wave server for some project communications that need more depth than email -- someone said, "let's set up a forum system", and I immediately thought of Wave. But the UI still demands Chrome: IE is slow as mud and sadly buggy, so it's clearly still using some of the old Wave client codebase. It's missing a lot of basic UI functionality, including some of the bits I most love about Wave. (Especially the ability to interject a thread into the middle of the base blip.) And unsurprisingly, there's no apparent Active Directory integration yet, which makes use in the corporate environment problematic.
Oh, well -- frankly, it's further along than I expected, and the problems are likely tractable. I'm going to have to deal with something more primitive for my current project, but there's at least plausible reason to hope that, by the time my next one starts up, I'll be able to set up an inside-the-firewall Wave server for its chatter...