Software Tutorials on Google Wave: Eclipsy

Google Wave absolutely floors me, but it isn't available yet. I think that Wave is going to revolutionize teaching software. Consider software tutorials. First, we need something like an Eclipsy, a hypothetical Wave agent/Eclipse plug-in that allows Eclipse to be integrated into a Wave. As one developer goes through the steps in a tutorial, a second developer (or even the same developer with a microphone), could be giving a verbal description of the actions.

Once the expert has successfully performed the tutorial, a student else could play it back and see each step in the processes. I see major advantages of using Wave. Perhaps you could play back the development in your Eclipse while listening to the process, with Eclipsy in a playback-mode. At the end of this, you would know that the process worked with your configuration. Assuming that it did work, you could then go through the steps yourself while listening to the audio & perhaps watching the steps in Eclipse running on some virtual machine that you would watch as your copy the steps at home. (Two monitors would be nice for this.) The ability to pause during the playback is a big advantage of a Wave solution.

With many Web 2.0 tools like Grails, you are iteratively developing you application. For example, you might start by defining all of your domain objects and use scaffolding to build the controllers. You would then define the relationships between all of the objects. Next, you might add more attributes. To complete the domain objects, you could go in and add the constraints. This sort of iterative approach seems perfect for the as-yet-hypothetical Eclipsy.

Typically, you would also follow an iterative approach to evolving the views and the controllers. Much of the skill in this approach is having a feel to know what to do in each iteration. Eclipsy would be a good way to developing this.

In a complementary role, Eclipsy seems like it could be used for version control. At the very least, Eclipsy would be tracking the state of each source code file and your project configuration. This means that it could also function as a version control system that you could replay to get to any state in your development.

Google I/O viewed from IOwa.

With some software presentations, you are overwhelmed by the show but afterwards the gee-wiz wears off as you start to piece together what is going on. But the more I think about Google Wave, the more the ideas are growing on me. At this time, hardly anyone has heard about Google Wave, but that is going to change. Within a few years, Google Wave could be recognized one of the few paradigm changing applications, much like hypertext going mainstream was to the growing of the web in the 1990's.

In the developer preview, there were no lack of eye-popping features:

• Drag and drop photos from iPhoto into the browser. Really cool use of Gears and GWT. Watching the photo upload automatically and appear on the other browsers in seconds was a direct reminder to me that we are only beginning to understand how the web can connect us.
• Watching real-time translation between French and English shows how we are going to be able to interact more freely in wider communities.
• The multiple, concurrent editing of a single document shows how much power there is concurrent versioning systems.
• The use of associative memory, which resides not only on the server, but is shared with each participant is part of the secret sauce that makes is seem that everyone on the wave is 'together'.

This just seems like it is the next phase in the evolution of the world wide web. Before this, the web was a bunch of places to go. With Wave, it will become a bunch of events to join, review and create.