Yesterday Google announced a new HTML 5 based tool for web based communication and collaboration called Wave.  One of the coolest things about Wave is this is an open-source project, anybody can embed waves in their site and build extensions using the Google Wave API.  The protocol called the Google Wave Federation Protocol  is based on XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol).

Reading the documentation on the protocol I immediately started to think about what impact these waves will have in environments with Application Delivery Controllers:

• What load balancing method is best?
• What about persistence?
• Can the content be compressed?
• Are the waves cacheable?
• Can the encryption be off-loaded from the servers to an application delivery controller?

I'll be interested to see how sites start to build waves.