Igor is a proof of concept Google Wave robot that helps people manage the process of adding references to an academic article.
See http://blogs.nature.com/wp/nascent/2009/07/igor_a_google_wave_robot_to_ma.html for a video walkthrough and help.
Igor is available at helpmeigor@appspot.com
The minimum you'll need to do to get started is to edit the appengine-web.xml file and put your own app engine application name inside the "application" element.
Note that I'm not normally a Java developer and this really is just a proof of concept. The code lacks tests and is poorly organized.
OTOH sometimes things that seem messy and complicated are that way for a reason. Usually the reason is that Google Wave is still a developer preview and bits of the Java API don't work yet or need changing (notably getting the IDs of newly created blips and communicating with gadgets).
The debugging log is turned on in the code. I recommend that you look at what's actually being passed between the Wave server and App Engine in the wire protocol JSON - right now it's the best way to work out what is and isn't supported by the Wave API! If it isn't in the JSON you can't access it in the robot.
Functions that use regular expressions to modify the text are the most obviously overly complicated pieces of code - patterns have to be matched one at a time because otherwise the String that you're finding matches on and the internal representation of the contents of the Wave (the TextView) get out of sync.
Some ideas for the future (feel free to submit patches):
- store structured citation and apply different styles on the fly
- ... expanding on the above turn the references block into a gadget that uses Frank Bennett's javascript CSL transformation code http://bitbucket.org/fbennett/citeproc-js/wiki/Home
- give feedback to the user through inline blips and gadgets rather than the text with red background status messages currently used (tried inline blips early on but couldn't work out how to avoid duplicates)
- write extension so citations can be picked through popup gadget
- extend Igor to do more than just citations
