Ever since Google Wave finally turned out the lights about a year ago, I have wondered what was going to happen to the project. I was pleased to find out that Google has handed the project off to Apache, and the project has been renamed to Apache Wave. Being open source, that meant I could install it myself to play around with it.

However, I have to say that I am kind of disappointed with the progress of the project since Apache took it over. Wave lacks an actual persistence layer, meaning that any waves created in the application are lost when the server dies. (Edit: As it turns out, I am wrong about this and it does in fact support saving waves.) I haven’t searched through bug trackers and mailing lists, but that seems to me a pretty big issue, and one that would be near the top of any developer’s todo list. It also somehow appears more sparse than Google’s offering, with many missing features and several broken plugins.

I don’t want to rail on the project. It’s open source, so those people who contribute to the project are being gracious with their time as it is. I just don’t see it becoming the collaborative email replacement app that it really could have been unless it gets a lot more love and attention.