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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

As a former google wave developer, I can only say that I hope this isn't the case. Wave's federation protocol embedded an XML-like data structure (wavelets) in protobufs (binary) which were then encoded using base64 and embedded in XMPP extensions (ie, more XML).

That way lies madness.

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thank you for giving me a new 'something' to contrast some of our internal transport cruft.

i can now, at least, think positively: 'well, at least it's not XML encapsulated in base64-encoded protobufs shipped over XML.'

How did Wave end up with that sort of mess? Isn't Google full of Very Smart People?

Here's a thought: what constitutes a very smart person? How often do those occur in the global population? Now, how many people are there on the planet and how big is the company?

The Earth may not be big enough for that to work out. This is before you remove people who aren't in this industry, people who are too young or too old to work there, people who don't want to work there, people who DID work there and left, and so on.

It might explain a lot, particularly when they go on a hiring bender. Where are all of these new people coming from?

Thats been the case with xooglers interviewing with my company. It seems like there are a lot of average to below average people working at Google for some reason. Or at least the below average people interview a lot.

The internal architecture of wave was very abstract. a lot of this abstraction was exposed in the first federation spec, somewhat due to necessity, somewhat due to lack of time.

They do love their XML in Android layouts, though @.@

What were the considerations which led to this design? Why not just stick with XML inside an XMPP extension directly?

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