Google I/O


Currently sitting in a session on day two of the Google I/O conference. The morning opened up with the keynote and announcement of Google Wave, which is something that seems very cool and has a lot of potential. Very cool start of the day.

After that I watched Ben and Dion talk about Bespin. I hadn’t seen Bespin before – it was definitely interesting, although I will be hard pressed to give up Emacs any day soon.

During lunch I came up with a fun idea, but it required something extra. I talked to Jon Tirsen, a Swedish friend from his ThoughtWorks days, who is on the Google Wave team – and he managed to get me an early access account for Google Wave. So I spent the next few hours hacking – and was able to unveil an Ioke Wave Robot during my talk. It is basically only a hello world thing, but it is almost certainly the first third-party Google Wave code… You can find it at http://github.com/olabini/iokebot. It is deployed as iokebot@appspot.com so when you have your Wave account you can add it to any waves. Very cool. I do believe there is a real potential for scripting languages to handle these tasks. Since most of it is about gluing services together, dynamic languages should be perfectly suited for it.

Finally I did my talk about JRuby and Ioke – that went quite well too. The video should be up on Google sooner or later.

And that was basically my Google I/O experience. Very nice conference and lots of interesting people.