In my post yesterday I noted the increased push by the Wave developers to make it easier for the wave community to build and deploy extensions. It turns out this flurry of activity coincided with the imminent release of Version 2 of the Wave API, announced today.

The first new feature is the:

Active API: In v2, robots can now push information into waves (without having to wait to respond to a user action). This replaces the need for our deprecated cron API, as now you can update a wave when the weather changes or the stock price falls below some threshold. You can learn more in the Active API docs.

Google Wave Developer Blog Announcement.

If I understand this correctly (and I’m not a developer so correct me if I’m wrong) this means that before today, a robot in a wave might have had to wait until a user opened a wave before it could refresh the information in the wave (updating stocks etc), now the robot can initiate a wave update itself, making it possible to have robots create new blips in response to events. This is a much smarter way for a robot to behave, and should make for far more interesting and functional bots.

For a more enlightened perspective from a wave developer, check out Mastering Wave’s take on the announcement.

So what I initially thought was just a push to get developers involved was actually leading to an announcement of a massive upgrade to the API. In the end though, the aim is the same - to get developers engaged and creating interesting software to make Wave an indispensable tool.

Google Wave Developer Blog: Introducing Robots API v2: The Rise of Active Robots.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/avoiretc/ / CC BY 2.0