We released beta version of tweat.org about 10 days ago. As me and Trent were having conversation in Google Wave (the first day I got an invitation from Brian), and planning for a meal to one of the best Indian Cuisine that I know of, we felt a need for tweat app for Google Wave. When it comes coding something new, the ‘coding-monkey’ inside me starts jumping. I immediately jumped into reading documentation. As Google Wave is still in very early stages, there are not too many resources available. The official Google Wave Extension documentation is pretty good and covers almost everything required to pull out your first Google Wave extension.

First I was confused on which extension should I choose – gadgets or robots? Personally I feel that a gadget is pretty much limited on what it can do, while robot seems to be more powerful (also you will create more whirls in your friends’ circle if you can say – “I’ve created a Robot for Google Wave”). But as soon as I learned that I’ve to learn a whole new framework to crate a new robot, I paused. To code a robot you should be familiar with either Python or Java Servlets. Notice my use of ‘framework’ here. Java is not new to me – being a Computer Science student, I’ve been taking Java for about 2 years in a row and I absolutely love Java. But I don’t have any experience regarding the web-server side of Java. I’ve been thinking to learn a different language or at least a better tool for a change and have been considering Groovy for a while. Grails framework seems an excellent tool for web development in Groovy. It couldn’t be a better chance (and challenge?) for me to learn Groovy/Grails than this time. I’ve already installed Groovy/Grails and already compiled and run my first ‘Hello, World!’ program. IBM developers works web site has got some really useful tutorials on Grails. In fact they got a whole series on it. Though I found that it is kind-of outdated for the latest version of Grails, it is still a very good starting point.

Learning a new language or tool is not bad but designing a publicly accessible piece of software using a tool/language in which you are not experienced with is a bad practice. So, I’ve decided not to code anything right now using Groovy/Grails/Java or Python for now. I will stick with PHP in which I’m pretty much comfortable with. This means no coding for Tweatbot for Google Wave right now. This doesn’t mean I’ve completely given up – NO! It won’t be too long before I’ll post another article covering few glitches with Grails/Groovy/Java. As I already said, I’m reading the tutorials so I should be ready to go for it in about a month. This also doesn’t mean there will be no Tweat extensions for Google Wave. I’m just thinking of getting a gadget out first to see how it works. It might also boost my confidence. It doesn’t seem too difficult to code a gadget. I might probably writing a tutorial to share my experience so stay updated!