We’ve had been a long tradition of technical collaboration with Google. We have built toolkits for Google App Engine, and  Google Data and have tight integration with Google Adwords, Visualization, Data Authentication and more in our platform. The latest collaboration has been around Google Wave, Chatter and Force.com. The result is the availability of the Force.com Toolkit for Google Wave.

During a session at last years Dreamforce, we presented a unique way of leveraging Force.com and Google Wave to enhance a customer and support agents experience. Customers could ‘self-serve‘, but could also reach out to a real person if they needed more assistance. That Dreamforce, Salesforce Chatter was also introduced to the world as a unique way to empower the social enterprise by enabling real-time collaboration with people and information at work. It makes logical sense for internal collaboration to be managed through Chatter, with its built in security and sharing models, but what about collaborating beyond the enterprise? Making it easy to put Chatter, the Force.com platform and Google Wave together made a lot of sense.

So what is the Force.com Toolkit for Google Wave? At a high level it is a framework for rapidly building apps that can communicate between the Force.com platform and Google Wave in a secure, extensible manner. The underlying connectivity between Google App Engine and Force.com is provided by the existing toolkit for Google App Engine, but we needed something more. The Force.com Toolkit for Google Wave introduces an Agent framework—a best practice pattern for writing Java classes to communicate with Force.com, an implementation of oAuth to allow individual users on a Google Wave to authenticate with Salesforce without the need to embed or share passwords, and an example of using the new Active Robot API, and Embed API to embed dynamically create a Google Wave and embed it in Force.com to create adhoc workspaces for a massively collaborative experience.

If you are at Google IO, come check out the official toolkit release Thursday afternoon at the Wave In the Enterprise session. The team will be there to chat and answer questions. If you are eager to get started now, check out the introduction article, download the code, and get building!