In other words. It’s like google wave, but simpler in every possible way.

This protocol uses two servers. The federation server and the storage server. The latter is incredably simple. In fact, the reference implementation is only about 200 lines of JS (Node.JS FTW). Thats because a storage server accomplishes just about three things. It receives message deltas. It applies them. And it pushes the delta to all subscribers. The subscribers are the federation servers, they act on the behalf of multiple clients, keeping track of users, their inboxes, etc.

Anyway, the big part about the design is that there is only one unit of information, and that is the message. There’s no such thing as waves, wavelets, conversations, private replies, threads (sort of lying here), blips and other information. It’s just messages. Messages are stored on storage servers, and are filled with HTML and a tree of information.

Messages can have other messages inside them. It’s just some xml-ish stuff. <thread></thread> is a thread and <message name=”http://blahblahblah.com/blahblahblah"></message&gt; is a message that goes inside the thread. You can stick it anywhere. In the middle (inline replies!) or at the end (normal replies!).

Messages don’t even have to have text. Gadgets are just messages that are slightly different.

http://github.com/antimatter15/awesomeness

There’s a lot that it doesn’t do because I’m too lazy to do it. And I can’t give you a live demo because I don’t have a node-enabled server.

Eventually, what will happen is a pluggable editor system and swapping between the new Mini UI and the old standard UI. The pluggable editor system will enable switching between the existing VectorEditor and OnlyPaths editors as well as SVG-edit. Possibly, OnlyPaths will be phased out as SVG-edit supports every feature of the former as well as many more. The priority editors with the new version will be VectorEditor (the Mini UI editor, based on Raphael so it works fine cross-browser, but is also much more limiting than the rest, including OnlyPaths which it partially replaces). SVG-edit is an awesome project which is being actively developed, and will add new features that may make the Ajax Animator viable for more than just stick figures. New features that will come from the transition could include Gradients, Curved paths, Wireframes, Zoom, Groups, Align tools, Rotation and Resizing (without bugs!), Polygon/Polyline editing, to name a small subset. It’s likely that SVG-edit will have far more features by the time it’s fully implemented. It’ll be awesome.

The SVG-edit UI won’t fit well with the Mini UI (which I actually like more), so the classical UI will be revived.