Google Wave Robot Development for Microsoft-oriented Developers

Receiving a Google Wave invitation from Google almost 2 months ago provided me with a compelling reason to get started with Google Apps-based development.

If you are a Microsoft-oriented developer, and are attempting to get started with Google Wave development, the following tips may help;

1. Use Eclipse as your IDE and Java for your development. Integration with the AppEngine from Eclipse is baked in (once the Google Plugin for Eclipse is installed) and very cool. 
2. I would stay away from the Python alternative as I found the AppEngine integration and deployment options relatively fractured and not as smooth. This could, of course, change as Google Wave itself and supporting tools are still in development.
3. Get started by writing robots for the Wave as this would immediately expose you to the Wave API event model. This helped me immensely.
4. If you are writing complicated Wave artefacts, keep an eye on memory consumption of the Chrome browser process (if you are using Google Chrome as your browser).

Below is a screenshot of my first Wave Robot that took me no longer than 30 minutes to build, deploy and test when leveraging Eclipse and Java. Exact instructions are available at http://code.google.com/apis/wave/extensions/robots/java-tutorial.html.