About a year ago, I mentioned Google’s decision to stop active development on Google Wave, and the Apache Foundation’s subsequent move to take ownership.

More recently, Google announced it will shut Wave down entirely in April 2012. Wired’s Webmonkey column reports that Apache’s efforts with Wave are now available in the form of “Wave in a Box”, a standalone client/server application that replicates the Wave experience.

Wave in a Box consists of two parts, a standalone wave server and a web client. The Wave in a Box web client looks a bit different than Google’s Wave user interface, but the same features are present. The Wave in a Box tools also have the distinct advantage of decentralization. Developers can run wave servers and host waves on their own hardware without Google being involved in any way.

This will be a great resource for those who liked Wave and want to keep using it after Google closes it down, or who dislike Google having access to their collaborative information. Of course, there are plenty of other collaborative editing tools out there as well.

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