Writing Wave robots that use blip titles and text

If you follow the Java Wave robot tutorial it is reasonably easy getting started. It took me a short while to get access to the titles and text of both new root blips (i.e., the start of a new Wave object) and child blips (i.e., new blips added to a root blip). Here is some code where I re-worked some of the example code (this is in the servlet that handles incoming JSON encoded messages from the Wave platform):
  public void processEvents(RobotMessageBundle events) {
    Wavelet wavelet = events.getWavelet();

    if (events.wasSelfAdded()) {
      Blip blip = wavelet.appendBlip();
      TextView textView = blip.getDocument();
      textView.append("I'm alive and ready for testing");
    }

    for (Event event : events.getBlipSubmittedEvents()) {
      // some of my tests:
      Blip blip = event.getBlip();
      if (!blip.getBlipId().equals(wavelet.getRootBlipId())) {      
        String text = blip.getDocument().getText();
        makeDebugBlip(wavelet, "blip submitted events: child blip: " + text);
      }
    }

    for (Event event: events.getEvents()) {
      Blip eventBlip = event.getBlip();
      // from original example:
      if (event.getType() == EventType.WAVELET_PARTICIPANTS_CHANGED) {    
        Blip blip = wavelet.appendBlip();
        TextView textView = blip.getDocument();
        String s3 = textView.getText();
        textView.append("Hello, everybody - a test... " + s3); 
      }
      if (eventBlip.getBlipId().equals(wavelet.getRootBlipId())) {
        String title = wavelet.getTitle();
        String text = eventBlip.getDocument().getText();
        makeDebugBlip(wavelet, "blip submitted events: root blip: title: " + title+"  text: " + text);
      }
    }
  
  }
  public void makeDebugBlip(Wavelet wavelet, String text) {
    Blip blip = wavelet.appendBlip();
    TextView textView = blip.getDocument();
    textView.append(text);
  }
There are APIs for changing the data in blips. This example simply adds new child blips to a wave. Note that child blips do not have their own title. Here, I am dealing with blips that are just text but blips can also contain images, video, sounds, etc.

One bit of advice: the Wave platform is definitely cool (in many ways) but it is being actively developed and modified. Sometimes things just stop working for a while, so I have adopted the practice of walking away from my Wave development experiments for a few hours if my robots stop working. Twice, things simply started working again with no changes. For debugging robot code (Java or Python AppEngne web apps), make sure to enable DEBUG output in logging: then the AppEngine Logs page is your new friend.

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