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peritext
A CRDT for asynchronous rich-text collaboration, where authors can work independently and then merge their changes.
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SurveyJS
Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
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automerge
A JSON-like data structure (a CRDT) that can be modified concurrently by different users, and merged again automatically.
Makes sense. Ranged deletes might be key to handle rich-text table mutations.
Seph, thanks for showing up. Author here. This write-up is just a generalization I've landed on, while thinking about the nature of another problem: handling block elements in rich text in Peritext - a project you've collaborated with I guess.
Here's the link - https://github.com/inkandswitch/peritext/issues/27
Do throw your thoughts too. I'd be happy pick your brain on this :)
There is this really beautiful algorithm implemented behind really oldschool JS that I have seen used a couple times: WebGME. https://github.com/webgme/webgme
It is a Model-Based-Systems-Engineering tool, as far as I can tell, and it lets you create "metamodels" (SysML diagrams / rules essentially) and then collaboratively author some model graph, giving you a "commit" for every action, a version history, a git-like branching and merging model, and more.
The collaborative aspect is pretty strong in their own UI, I've tried to build my own and couldn't get it as easily, but I guess my question is: has anyone ever used this tool as well?
Martin Kleppman has proposed using range deletes for all deletes in automerge[1]. In diamond types (my own CRDT) I'm still on the fence about whether or not this is a good idea.
The downside is if you select & delete two functions, and I concurrently insert a new function in the middle of that range, then the merged result will delete my function. Thats a really bad outcome - but its pretty rare in practice.
A much more common case is, I deleted 2 lines of code and you modify a parameter in one of those function calls. In this case, using range deletes your edits will also be deleted (which is what we want). Using individual deletes, the result will end up with some random junk left behind, in the form of whichever characters I typed.
When we're editing code as plain text, I don't think there's any such thing as perfect here. For asyncronous collaborative editing (like git), I think generating conflict markers & human supervision for merging might be the best answer.
I'd love to see someone make a prototype editor which can do AST-level concurrent editing. That would be super interesting in a bunch of ways - like, you could use the AST to do syntax highlighting in any editor too. But I'm not sure how it'd merge code when the parse tree is invalid - like, if I remove a closing brace (}) early in the function, what happens?
There's a lot of cool ideas in this space. I'm excited to see people explore them as CRDTs get more popular and more mature.
[1] https://github.com/automerge/automerge/issues/401