Bryan and I have recently begun to adopt Google Wave as our central tool for business communications – as a distributed development house, with he and I living in different provinces, good communication is essential. Google Wave is proving to be an exceedingly useful as a communications medium. We've found that collaborating on software specifications through wave is just so much better than working off traditional documents, because the “document” can evolve naturally. We can work on draft documents together without needed to shoot different versions of a spec backwards and forwards between each other, having to keep track of who has the “latest copy”, and having to wait until it is “our turn” to edit. Google wave makes genuine realtime collaborative composition possible, and this is a big win.

One of the things that makes Google Wave so useful are the so-called “gadgets” that one can plug into a wave to extend its functionality. After a discussion on how best to log project time, I thought I'd take a quick look at how Google Gadgets are put together with the idea that, if it's not too much of a mission, I would try and build us a gadget that we can put onto our waves, so we can track, and discuss, time in the same medium that we do all of our other communications.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that writing a Google gadget for wave is extremely easy - consisting of a very natural mix of XML, HTML, and Javascript (and, yes, you can use jQuery).

I was going to write an example gadget, but as I read a little more into it I got sidetracked with playing with some of the options, so I'm Lazy-linking in today's post.

Two useful links for learning about developing gadgets for Wave are, first – obviously – Google's own guide to writing wave gadgets

http://code.google.com/apis/wave/extensions/gadgets/guide.html

And a nice little tutorial on how to integrate jQuery into wave aware gadgets can be found at

http://fluxux.com/programming/729