This is part 3 of my Google Wave developer sandbox review. Part 1 and part 2 were both an introduction to some wave concepts. In this part we’ll be taking a look at the Google Wave Gadget API by writing a simple rating gadget. If you don’t know what gadgets are or what they do, please read my previous post here.

The gadget

The gadget I have written is supposed to be used when you want wave participants to rate something inside your wave (or the wave itself). You simply add the gadget to your wave, set the title and you’re good to go. I also wanted the gadget to have a settings menu that was only visible by the person who added the gadget to the wave.

Two days after I got my invitation to the Ubuntu One beta and wrote a review about my first impressions I also received an invitation to join the Google Wave developer sandbox. As my Ubuntu One review was pretty popular (had about 1k pageviews the first day – thank you dzone.com users), I decided to write something down about my first Google Wave experiences.

I will divide the review into a few separate pieces. This post will handle the general Google Wave Sandbox stuff, things I noticed when I first used the service. A second post will handle some advanced wave concepts like search, attachments, gadgets and robots. The last two posts will be about writing a gadget and a robot on the platform. I still have no idea about what kind of gadget and robot to write so if you have any suggestions/ideas, please leave a comment at the bottom of this page.