Many of us have come across a range of real-time collaborative apps that helps teammates to work simultaneously on the same document or project. Apps such as Google Docs or Spreadsheets allow users to edit documents simultaneously. But what happens when we give our users the ability to edit the same document simultaneously?
Users end up overwriting each other's data. So if we dig more behind the working of these real-time collaborative apps, we will come across terms such as OT (Operational Transformation) and CRDT (Conflict-free Replicated Data Type). Now some of you may wonder what actually these terms signify. Followed by which one of these should we use for building real-time collaborative apps.
OT relies on an active server connection to coordinate and guarantee all clients operate correctly.
CRDT is capable of working peer-to-peer with end-to-end encryption. It only needs to coordinate connections between clients, even if a server is used. CRDT is resilient to transient network connections. It even works if the clients go offline for a while, make changes, and synchronize when the network returns.
For knowing more about OT (Operational Transformation) and CRDT (Conflict-free Replicated Data Type) refer to this link.
Collaborative apps can cause divergence if there is no synchronization between the clients while editing text. This can lead to a whole lot of conflicts in the final data. We will be going with CRDT to avoid these kinds of issues.
There are many types of CRDTs. Refer to this link for a good overview of the types of CRDT. Currently, there are many CRDT frameworks implemented.
Further Reading: How to build a real-time collaborative app using CRDT in angular?
In this tutorial, we will be using the Yjs NPM module as the CRDT framework. Users can implement their own design for the text editor. We are using Angular in this tutorial to implement the same.
Using the CRDT algorithm different users can easily collaborate in a real-time text editor or todo app to jot down their notes. This, in turn, helps the users to create notes easily and also prevents from generating inconsistent data while users come back online.
Real-time-Collaboration - OT vs CRDT
Figma Multiplayer Technology using CRDT
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