houshuang

One neat thing about live collaboration is that every single edit is stored. This enables some nice things, like seamless replay of the entire document editing history. We've been working for a while on trying to analyze edit histories, to see if we could predict which stage of editing a document is in, which writing strategy users use, how a small team is collaborating etc. (Main purpose is to support teachers using this with student groups). We have some code here that works with Etherpad and ShareDB (https://github.com/chili-epfl/FROG-analytics), and happy to share preprints with anyone interested.

I am curious about this argument - I think CKEditor 5 made a similar one in this epic blog post about how they implemented real-time collaboration (https://ckeditor.com/blog/Lessons-learned-from-creating-a-ri...). We're using Quill.js with ShareDB, which supports JSON structures (which is great, because for us we often have documents with several rich text fields, and other complex structures). So far we've been able to do anything we wanted with Quill, and I've never felt limited by the data structures we have available... (We also do all kinds of other stuff with ShareDB JSON).

I guess one reason you could need custom types would be to ensure consistency - if two keys depend on each other, and one user sets one key, and the other user sets another key, and the document is now invalid, you'd need the engine to be able to reconcile at a higher level?

tmbb has been doing work on writing a ShareDB compatible backend in Elixir (https://elixirforum.com/t/realtime-collaboration/9736/5), this has long been a dream of mine. If not, having a separate Node server that just deals with ShareDB documents would also be feasible - all the app logic could still be in Elixir. Happy to share stuff we've been doing with Quill, for example my company recently sponsored work on shared cursors/presence for Quill.

Thanks for the component you provided for shared cursors in text areas (https://github.com/convergencelabs/html-text-collab-ext). I've been using it with ShareDB, and have been working on adapting it to work with single text inputs, which has been surprisingly difficult (mainly dealing with scroll/overflow behaviour).

Surprised the author didn't mention Quill.js, which works really well with ShareDB, and is fully open source. We've been doing a lot of fun stuff with it - here's a talk I gave recently as a job talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN37rJRmISQ. (It worked, I got hired :)). As a side project, I'm working on a ShareDB backed wiki, where we can use rich text for editing pages, but also other components, like spreadsheets or mindmaps, and everything supports live editing - I think it would be amazing for classrooms, hackathons, any kind of meeting etc. Would love to talk with anyone interested in collaborating. I have been waiting for a few features to complete to make a proper demo video, but this early one shows off some of the ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-lU-in3ydc (https://github.com/chili-epfl/FROG)