Google Waves - basic structure

Question

Is a wave limited to the sharing of textual information (HTML), or am I correct in assuming that a wave can contain arbitrary data (represented in XML), so long as it also contains the javascript necessary to render it in a meaningful way?

I ask because the collaborative document preparation demonstrated in the Google I/O video looks very powerful, but there are many other types of documents than simple rtf text. In my case I would be looking interactively to develop gantt charts.

Answer 1

I got access to Google Wave a few days ago, and here's what the raw data for their Sokoban game (which supports two players playing simultaneously on the same board) looks like, for example:

<blip>
  <p _t="title">
  </p>
  <p>
    <w:gadget author="[email protected]" prefs="" state="" title="" url="http://sokoban-server.appspot.com/com.example.simplegadget.client.SokobanGadget.gadget.xml"&gt;
      <w:pref name="playerAllocation" value="1 1,blixt">
      </w:pref>
      <w:pref name="totalMoves" value="8">
      </w:pref>
      <w:pref name="playerPositions" value="1 4,2">
      </w:pref>
      <w:pref name="rockPositions" value="6 2,2 3,2 14,2 15,2 16,2 4,3">
      </w:pref>
    </w:gadget>
  </p>
</blip>

So yes, you can store any data you like in a single blip, with the possibility to go backwards in "time" to see older versions of the data etc.

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By the way, if you're interested in seeing some code for a robot that sits in a wave and interacts with users, I made one for a game I'm developing: Google Code Project for multifarce (and the game in question, it's not really public yet and as such not particularly functional.) The bot source is here: multifarce Wave robot source

Basically, all you need to get a bot running are the 14 last lines in that code. I love it! =)