I spent a considerable amount of time this weekend hacking away at my Google Wave robot, Wave Toolkit. It’s a lot of fun and I’ve managed to write something that allows for quick implementation of ‘commands’ from initial idea to ‘live’.

One of the frustrating things about developing Google Wave extensions is the poor documentation. It starts out great: lovely overview documentation and tutorial, with plenty of insight and step-by-step instructions; and then nothing. It stops there. Apart from reading the API documentation which can be cumbersome, you’re left alone in the dark, weeping like a sad puppy after meeting its new owners.

An example of this is using Annotations within Google Wave; formatting text for bold or italics,  providing nicely worded hyperlinks or embedding images is governed by inserting annotations that ‘explain’ how the text should look. If you try to find out how to use these objects within the Python API you’ll see it’s nearly impossible. I got my answer only from guessing and scouring the Google Group and reading and example in Java, then posting when that didn’t work and finally getting some helpful advice. Please Google, document this protocol more!

So, to save an further frustration, here’s how to use Annotations in the Google Wave python API for robots:
doc = wavelet.CreateBlip().GetDocument()
doc.SetText("THIS IS ANNOTATED TEXT")
doc.SetAnnotation(Range(2, 12), "link/manual", "http://www.google.com")

I hope to hell that helps someone and saves the pain I underwent to work it out! Buggered if I know how to bold text though…Happy hacking!